ClearType in Longhorn is Great

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ClearType in Longhorn is Great

Thursday 22 July, 2004, 01:25 AM

A few months ago, I wrote about how I was almost but not quite delighted with ClearType. In order to illustrate what I wasn't quite happy about, I built a prototype to illustrate how I thought it could be improved, which I somewhat cheekily called IanType...

Some time after I wrote that, build 4074 of Longhorn (the WinHEC build) shipped. It illustrates that Microsoft were well ahead of me here - it has fixed the thing I didn't like about XP's ClearType, and it's just great! (It also looks a whole lot better than my IanType prototype.)

This image shows the three side by side, each displaying a lowercase letter 'o' in Arial:

ClearType (XP), IanType, and ClearType (Longhorn)

The one on the left is XP's current implementation of ClearType. This clearly shows the shortcomings of that implementation - the top and bottom of the 'o' are noticeably a lot more jagged than the sides - you can see the 'staircasing' quite clearly at the top and bottom. The middle one is my experimental 'IanType' output. This reduces the jaggies, but has some visible discoloration, and looks a bit lumpy in places, especially the inside of the right hand edge.

The image on the right is from Longhorn build 4074. This looks better than either of the other two images in every respect. It minimizes the staircasing on the near-horizontal features, but also provides a considerably better representation of the near-vertical curves than my implementation, and (on my screen at least) is noticeably better in that respect than the XP implementation.

The near-horizontal features obviously still don't look quite as good as the near-vertical features, but that's inevitable - ClearType exploits the full effective resolution of LCD flat panels, which all have a horizontal resolution three times better than their vertical resolution.

(Of course if you're reading this on a CRT, all three of those images will probably look a bit suspect...)

IanG on Tap

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ClearType in Longhorn is Great