Font Smoothing

Have you ever wondered why some characters look better than others when displayed on a computer screen? For example letters that are predominantly made up of vertical and horizontal lines such as the I, L, l, E, F and T look fine. However, those made up of diagonal and curved lines such as W, N, y, o and S look awkward and jagged. In his book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte describes these characters as looking like 'badly made Christmas ornaments'. Letters, like all images displayed on screen, are made up from square pixels. On most computer systems when it comes to text these pixels can be either on or off, black or white

Bit-Mapped fonts in particular, at low resolutions have very jagged edges.  

Font smoothing, is basically the same thing as "antialiasing".  The jagged edges are smoothed by using anti-aliasing, which simply applies a bit of “blur” to the edges.  This smooths the appearance of screen type by using gray pixels as well as black ones to render the type - and reduces the apparent jaggedness of the characters, making them look slightly fuzzy.

NOTE:  only the problem areas of curves and diagonals are smoothed. The vertical and horizontal strokes are left intact.

Tunring on Font Smoothing within Windows

To turn on font smoothing:

1. go to Control Panel/Display . . . 

2. click the Effects tab

3. select "Smooth edges of screen fonts" 

4. click OK.

Example of Font Smoothing

The 'Smooth Fonts' feature supported by Windows 95 with the Plus! pack simply uses intermediate colored pixels to smooth out the jagged diagonals and curves. This process is also known as anti-aliasing or gray scaling.