Turn jagged letters smoooove

July 16th, 2007 by benny

There a problem in today’s world. It’s widespread and is very crippling, in some cases. The problem, of course, is that of the “jaggies” (so maybe not the technical term). Many computers with LCDs and many laptops suffer from this. This is when the fancier, (usually) more interesting fonts on a webpage or elsewhere looks very jagged on LCD monitors. On the CRT monitors, the text will display fine. Take a look at the example of bwong.net below:
A Difference using ClearType
On the left, we have the jagged letters. As you can see, the letters look very crude and just plain ugly. On the right, however, we have text that is rendered using what is called “ClearType.” See the difference? The font is much smoother and much easier on the eyes than the one on the right. There’s an interesting reason behind it, but I won’t bother explaining since the Wikipedia article can do it far better.
Instead, I’ll show you guys step-by-step (there’s only three) how to alleviate this problem on Windows (as far as I know, Macs don’t have this problem)

Step 1:

Right click your desktop and click on “Properties”:
Turning on ClearType: Step 1

Step 2:

Click on the “Appearance” tab, and then the “Effects” button:
Turning on ClearType: Step 2

Step 3:

Click the checkbox “Use the following method…” and then choose “ClearType” from the pull-down menu:
Turning on ClearType: Step 3

And voila! Smooooove letters.