XP users with notebooks or flat screens-Here's a neat, built in XP display feature!

[astro]

Try it. You might like it or not. It makes my screen text much more legible.
Right button mouse click on the desktop and the little right click applet menu pops up

> Chose “Properties” - Display control applet pops up
> Choose “Appearance” - Appearance menu panel pops up
> Choose “Effects” - Effects panel pops up
> Choose “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts” - change it from the default “Standard” to “ClearType” then click on “OK” at the bottom right of the “Effects” panel and “Apply” at the bottom of the main display panel.

Desktop Fonts will be more precise and well formed especially iin Internet Explorer, where they will now look more like high resolution printed text. Makes a much bigger difference on TFT flat screens than on CRT tube monitors.

Makes a big difference for me in clarity and usability. If it’s not to your liking simply walk through the above instructions and change it back to “standard”.

[Mangetout]

If your cleartype doesn’t seem as clear as it should (like mine did to begin with - it had visible coloured tinges), visit this Microsoft page to tweak the settings (there isn’t a buit-in utility to do it).

[Kal]

Thanks for the tips astro and Mangetout, my wife’s been given a new laptop for work with XP installed on it. When she stops snarling at me everytime I even look at at and actually lets me play with it a little, I may try them.

[Mockingbird]

It looks good on my flat screen, even though it isn’t TFT.

[Jman]

I use cleartype on my CRT monitor, and it still looks better than the normal type. Some CRT users don’t like it, but it’s sharp, crisp, and darn good looking on my screen.

Jman

[MC_E]

OK, I just tried this on my $99 special 17" monitor and it made my physically sick to my stomach to look at it. I was barely able to change it back without vomiting. Seriously. I still feel nauseous.

That’s just weird… has that type of thing ever happened to anyone else?

By the way, I also get nauseous when playing 3D first-person-shooter games on the PC or playstation. Does anyone else or am I just “different”?

MC$E

[astro]

*Originally posted by MC$E *
**OK, I just tried this on my $99 special 17" monitor and it made my physically sick to my stomach to look at it. I was barely able to change it back without vomiting. Seriously. I still feel nauseous.

That’s just weird… has that type of thing ever happened to anyone else?

By the way, I also get nauseous when playing 3D first-person-shooter games on the PC or playstation. Does anyone else or am I just “different”?

MC$E **

Hence my warning about it really being more suited for TFT flat screens vs CRT tube monitors. The ClearType engine can yield spectacular improvements in visibility, but the way it does this is to make very fine shadowing and outline adjustments to the display fonts and is really designed for the way a LCD screen displays fonts. Unless you have a CRT with incredibly precise alignment and a very high refresh rate (highly unlikely on a $99 CRT) using ClearType on a CRT tube monitor will be highly unpleasant.

Here is additonal information. It’s really quite an interesting technology.

What is ClearType?

ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper.

ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Before ClearType, the smallest level of detail that a computer could display was a single pixel, but with ClearType running on an LCD monitor, we can now display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width. The extra resolution increases the sharpness of the tiny details in text display, making it much easier to read over long durations
How did Microsoft come to develop ClearType?

ClearType builds upon a tradition of dedication to high-quality font technology at Microsoft. Since the early nineties Microsoft has continued to improve its display and font capabilities, including the further development of TrueType font technology originally licensed from Apple. Looking to further improve Microsoft’s font rendering technology Microsoft researchers spent more than two years sifting through a large amount of research related to both typography and the psychology of reading. They concluded that reading is a form of pattern recognition. People become immersed in reading only when word recognition is a subconscious task and the conscious mind is free to read the text for meaning.

What was discovered is that word recognition is only subconscious when typographical elements such as the shape and weight of letterforms, and the spacing between letters work together to present words as easily recognized patterns. With these findings in mind, Microsoft began taking a closer look literally at how type was being rendered on screens.

How does ClearType display technology work?

To understand how ClearType works, one first has to understand what makes an LCD screen different from other types of displays. Most screens created images made up of pixels, which when magnified look like single squares. The equivalent of one pixel on an LCD screen is actually composed of three sub-pixels: one red, one green, and one blue (R-G-B). Seen together these sub-pixel triplets combine to be seen by the human eye as a single pixel.

If we were to look at a single pixel our eye would see it as in the illustration above. However if we were to magnify the image we would see that each pixel is actually made up of three separate subpixels. And so if when we see white on an LCD screen we are really looking at red green and blue stripes.

How does this help improve the quality of digital type display?

Traditional computer font rendering assumes that each pixel is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ appearing as tiny black squares. Letters appear jagged on the computer screen because they are formed from many of these tiny squares or pixels. Traditional grayscaling assumes that each pixel has no internal structure, so it smooths the jagged edges but sacrifices edge sharpness. ClearType knows that LCDs are made up of colored sub-pixels. ClearType uses a model of the human visual system to choose the brightness values of the sub-pixels. With ClearType, letters on the computer screen appear smooth, not jagged, yet the edges remain sharp.

etc etc