Screen Fonts: Shape Accuracy or On-Screen Readability?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Jun 2009 21:40 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces The Engineering 7 weblog has an item about the improvements made in the ClearType font rendering technology which has been included in Windows since Windows XP. While I won't go too deeply into that post, I did figure it was a good opportunity to talk about font antialiasing in general; which type do you prefer?
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abraxas
Member since:
2005-07-07

The inner corners of "o"s and "d" are smudgy, I find that kind of blurryness much more irritating than having an overall smooth (or blurry if you prefer that term) look, because of the stark contrast to the sharpness of the rest of the letters.


Rounded edges are either going to be blocky or a little fuzzy given the nature of LCDs. I hate jagged blocky edges so I prefer a slight fuzziness to rounded edges but it is not nearly as bad as OSX fuzziness in my opinion. It's a good compromise for me.

Also the contrast between bold and regular fonts is not high enough (either are too thin and the difference in font weight between regular and bold is too little).


I don't see that at all. The bold "Read More" and "Comments" links are significantly bolder than the standard text. I really don't see how it could be confusing at all.

Also with font weights appearing too thin in general you end up with worse readability due to reduced contrast to the background. Sharp lines don't help if they end up looking like hairlines.


I'll chalk that up to preference.

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