Code Away

Hardly anyone I know (even developers) is aware of the fact that Windows XP, the most used OS in the world, has an option to anti-alias screen fonts.

Just as a brief intro on smooth fonts, here are some screenshots:

Yahoo homepage with default screen fonts

Yahoo homepage with ’smooth’ screen fonts

For those who don’t see any difference in particular, I’ve marked areas in (rather out-of-place) 3 magenta-colored rectangles. The smoothening effect makes the difference most in case of Arial Bold font. And you should certainly check it for Verdana Italic or Arial Italic font

To enable smooth screen fonts, all you have to do is:

• Right click on desktop
• Select “Properties”
• Go to “Appearance” tab
• Click on “Effects…” button
• Check “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”
• Select “Clear Type”
• Proceed with “Apply”s and “OK”s

Well, this doesn’t make a difference to many. But because of this default setting, many sites which want to give a polished look end up displaying everything in images which use smooth fonts, thereby increasing download time and bandwidth for the page.

Agreed, WinXP was brought in when the hardware was not great and “anti-aliasing” or smoothening the display fonts would require bit of (already low) processing power. But Windows XP SP1 and SP2 were available much later. I wonder why the default setting is still good old jagged edges.