Brian Nelson wrote: > I find that, for well-designed fonts, the jaggies are not an issue.
Fonts specifically designed for pixel-oriented displays (such as Microsoft's Georgia and Verdana) certainly are much more readable on screen at small sizes than traditional print fonts such as Times or Helvetica. However, they still have curves and diagonal lines (especially in italic form), and therefore they have jaggies. Some people (including me) prefer to see even these fonts anti-aliased. > Here's a well-written rant on the subject: > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html It's fairly content-free, actually. His whole argument boils down to, "Here, look at these two samples -- doesn't the non-anti-aliased one look better?", to which I can only reply, "No, I find the anti-aliased one more readable." Which, relative to my eyes, basically destroys his whole rant. Again, YMMV, but my whole point is that you should recognize that my MMV, and accept that this is a matter of preference for each of us, not something that has a single right answer that is valid for everyone. Anti-aliased text is a bit blurry. Non-anti-aliased text is jaggy. Therefore, neither is perfect. Which type of imperfection is "better" is a value judgment that each user can make for him/herself. Display resolution has, of course, been increasing gradually for years. Eventually we'll reach a point where the jaggies recede into near-invisibility. At that point, there will be much less need for anti-aliasing, but we're not there yet. For now, having anti-aliasing support available is a good thing, as a stop-gap measure for those of us who find a little blur less irritating and less damaging to readability than jaggies on the displays we currently use. I don't really care whether anti-aliasing is on or off by default, as long as it's easy for each user to turn it on or off as s/he may prefer. Craig
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