Cleartype Web Tune-up

If you’re running Windows XP and have a digital display, you can tune your ClearType implementation at a nifty Web site Microsoft provides. In fact, on this page you can check and uncheck a box to toggle ClearType and watch the text on the page go from crummy to spiffy in real time.

ClearType is Microsoft’s version of a technology sort-of invented by Apple that takes advantage of the fact that a single pixel on an LCD screen is in fact composed of a red, green and blue sub-pixel. By turning on the sub-pixels selectively, text can be smoothed out (“anti-aliased”). (Adobe also has a version of this technology, called CoolType.) It does make a difference.

(Here’s something I wrote about ClearType a while ago if you want more info. And here’s a Seybold Report on the topic too.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw