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Fonts on XP

  • Article

Scoble and Dudley are having a debate about fonts and I can't help but think the little screenshot isn't enough to go on. For one, it's clear that Japanese fonts are not rendered using ClearType, so that's a topic for a different day. Right now I want to focus on regular Latin fonts.

I've put up a test page along with a screenshot that shows what everyday fonts look like on my Windows XP machine (with ClearType, tuned to my eyes on a Dell 2000FP, and 120 DPI fonts). I'm interested in seeing comparisons rendered on OS X, Linux, Windows with different settings, etc. Feel free to swap out fonts with ones you think look better; overall quality is what matters, not font-for-font rendering comparisons.

Note: When viewing the screenshot, make sure you have image scaling disabled. Also, if you post your own, please use PNG.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2004
    Tahoma and Andale Mono italics aren't really a good test, because those font families don't have an italic face. See your Fonts folder. When there is no italic face, Windows fakes one up by shearing the normal face by about 30 degrees.

    IMO, ClearType and cousins look good at an initial viewing, but my eyes get tired after about a few minutes. I run my 19" CRT at work (a standard shadow-mask design, Iiyama Vision Master 450) at 1152x864 with Small Fonts, because I prefer the shape of the characters and that the 16x16 icons aren't oddly stretched or blurry. A bit of armchair calculating suggests I'm actually using about 80dpi.

    I do use the Standard anti-aliasing method, which kicks in for Arial Bold and Times New Roman Bold for the top two sizes and for the smallest size of all the fonts in your example. It looks terrible for Arial and TNR, but it looks like something's overwritten the versions that shipped with Windows XP with versions dated in 1999.
  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2004
    Mike, I can completely understand why you wouldn't turn it on. Besides the CRT, with that res and screen size, any kind of anti-aliasing for normal 8-12 point sizes would cause text to appear blurry.

    Jason, your comment about 192 DPI is interesting. Personally, I think toolbars and icons should all use vector graphics at this point. Maybe in a few years...
  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2004
    Windows looks OK with anti aliased text on my CRT monitors. It's not super clear like a good TFT, but it's nearly as good.

    I run quite a low DPI (I have a couple of 22in monitors running at 1280x1024 each, so you do the math). I find like this, I have enough desktop space and text is big and easy to read without being too cluttered.

    Ideally if I could run 1600 x 1200 at 100Hz I would do this, but I find 85Hz a tad flickery (I have very sensitive eyes, and these tubes are brighter than your average CRT)
  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2005
    Tony Schreiner has gotten into the conversation that Scoble and Dudley are having over font aliasing...
  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2007
    Tony Schreiner has gotten into the conversation that Scoble and Dudley are having over font aliasing