Anti-aliased FontsWhat is the big deal with
anti-aliased fonts? All over the Linux community, people rave about how
much better things are with anti-aliased fonts. In fact,
here
is a review of SuSE Linux Desktop in which the author raves: "By
default, display fonts have that slick anti-aliased look familiar from
Windows XP and Mac OS X". Slick? Since when did "smudged and apparently
out of focus" equal "slick"?
I dunno about Windows - the fonts there always look fine to me (that's
emphatically NOT an endorsement, by the way! :-) ) but I'm using OS X
now, and I usually use Linux, and frankly, I never met an anti-aliased
font I didn't hate. I've done all I can, as a newbie to the Mac, to
turn off anti-aliasing, and I always do in Linux. As far as I can tell,
"anti-aliased" is just a synonym for "smudged", "blurred", or just
plain "buggered up". They make me feel as if there's something wrong
with my eyesight, and before long I invariably start seeking out
distant objects to look at, just to check whether I need a new
prescription for my glasses. Next, I start messing with the monitor
settings. Then I realize that anti-aliasing is at work, turn it off,
and voila! Fonts as crisp and clean as you could ever wish for.
I'm neither a font nor graphics expert - and no doubt it shows - but it
seems to me that any problems I've encountered with fonts must be
either down to the font design or the video driver, and need something
substantially more powerful than a bit of smudging to put them right.
Oh boy! It feels good to get that off my chest :-)