On every Windows system I've used recently (XP and 7, I haven't touched Vista) I cannot seem to get fonts of all sizes looking decent.
If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally) larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts look terrible as a result.
When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on all fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result.
If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course.
Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make all size fonts (excluding tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of Windows?
Fonts are designed for 300dpi and up and are made of mathematical vectors instead of pixels, to make them look good on 72 and 96 dpi (Apple & MS) hacks like hinting and antialiasing are used by the rasterizers (software that converts mathematical vectors to pixels) in their products. They are hacks and not real solutions as there aren't any, they have the tradeof you mention. However I advice you to go for the hinting and antialiasing for small fonts on screen and leave the large ones alone as long you don't display it on some megascreen, they both will come out perfect on your printer (unless you made bad settings or use cheap fonts). Subpixel antialiasing is mostly antialiasing with the help of color while normal antialiasing is a grayscale one.
You can't really have this conversation without images.
What you describe as awful and jagged could well be the intended effect that Cleartype is supposed to deliver. It is designed to fit letters to the pixel grid, just a slightly finer pixel grid than standard windows because it makes use of subpixels horizontally.
Other people might give you advice on how to get "good" fonts without realising that what you want might be the OS X type rendering that they think is "blurry" and "unreadable".
I wondered what he meant here too. He knows the difference and in fact rails angrily against UK-English speakers because we use "subtitles" to describe both subtitles and captions.
If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally) larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts look terrible as a result.
When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on all fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result.
If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course.
Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make all size fonts (excluding tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of Windows?