Font smoothing never was Microsoft’s forte, even the not-so-old Windows XP boasted of horrible font renderation, let alone other fancy stuffs. While on the other side, being hailed from Desktop Publishing front, Apple brought richer font smoothing experience in Mac line of operating systems. MS decided to change the course of game with its ‘Cleartype’ technology, first applied OS wide in Windows Vista.
Now Cleartype is good at an initial look and performs fine with Microsoft approved Cleartype enabled fonts. But things are not the same always with other fonts and could become rather disappointing to work with in Windows Vista. For example, graphic designers swear by Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator etc and they come with a great number of fonts included in installer. Many of these fonts are used in Desktop Publishing industry and needs to be perfectly rendered. Surprisingly Cleartype is pawned here with just providing ‘standard’ font smoothing to them. Unavailability of Sub-Pixel Rendering kills the pleasant feeling of them and easily convert them into death screams for a graphic designer. Fonts like Myriad Pro, Lucida Family fonts appear horribly jittery in Wordpad and throughout various MS Office apps.
