April 25, 2001
Untitled
I’ve always been of the opinion that the font smoothing built into the Mac OS was a bit clunky looking. If Adobe Type Manager would anti-alias TrueType fonts as well as it does PostScript ones, I’d use it exclusively. But since ATM doesn’t swing both ways — associating with the Béziers while giving the Quadratic Splines the cold shoulder — I usually opt to turn the font smoothing option off completely. One piece of software that also does system-level anti-aliasing is SmoothType, created by Greg Landweber, the crux behind the code of Kaleidoscope and other interface-noodling utilities. Using SmoothType, on-screen type appears truer in character shape and letterspacing than when rendered greyscale by Apple’s built-in anti-aliasing engine. It’s still not perfect. In fact, the type occasionally wanders over to this side of fuzzy. However, in most cases the lack of harsh edges on the characters makes the text infinitely more enjoyable to read. There is a comparison of the two font smoothing techniques on David Earls’ typographer.com site. Via Microsoft Typography
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