Discovery Gaming Community

I stumbled upon this little thing today.

It's an alternate font renderer for Windows that makes them look more like Linux and Mac. If you ever used these systems you know that rendered text on them looks a lot better than on Windows, because of font smoothing and some other cool stuff that is not on Windows by default.

However, this application changes that and allows you to customise how the fonts in the system are rendered, making them smoother and better-looking. It works with many applications for Windows and most importantly, it works with Freelancer.

I obviously would not recommend it if your machine is bad and your system power cannot afford it, but I haven't noticed any significant impact on Freelancer's performance and it makes the fonts look hell of a lot better.

MacType


I figured I should give you some comparison. The first one is without MacType, the second one is with.

I still prefer not having fonts smoothed. It just looks much clearer/cleaner and doesn't cause blurry text or other problems.
Also it helps with seeing exactly pixel widths of stuff...

I, being used to the non-smoothed text, constantly see the yellowish(left)/blue(right) outlines on the smoothed fonts. It just looks weird to me.

An example from the unsmoothed fonts:


Comparision of the three options, NoSmoothing-Win-MacType:
No smoothing
Window's ClearType, I guess?
MacType

(big, 1865x230)

I still don't get why I ever would want to smooth fonts tbh.
I hate it when Windows decides to go derp and smooth some fonts even though I said "turn ClearType off".

But heh, if you like blurry text, fine with me. D:

Honestly, for me the smoothed text looks a lot better and reading it causes much less eyestrain. Sometimes even Courier is readable.

Weird. And I constantly feel like I need glasses when seeing smoothed text because it makes me feel like the text is blurry.

But heh, for whoever likes it - and is used to it, which I am clearly not - I'd say the MacType definatly looks a bit better.
The readability of text is definatly increased a bit through having the text appear more bold, at least now I see it, when my eyes are quite tired from it being very late here. Overall I still prefer unsmoothed, mostly because it does not always look good to have smoothing on.
(I also remember having had problems with Windows' ClearType because it was working different for my two screens...buuuut...NO SOFTNESS ALLOWED FOR A GERMAN! Need hard, edgy letters which look NEAT AND TIDY! 8|)

...I should really go to bed.

There is no difference

(03-01-2015, 06:33 AM)nOmnomnOm Wrote: [ -> ]There is no difference

this.

For me, it is less about the smoothness or sharpness but rather the color used. The dark theme of the forum makes it very hard for reading completely white text for too long.

This is why I am sort of peeved about the change in the textbox. Nobody asked for this.


Other than that though:

(03-01-2015, 06:33 AM)nOmnomnOm Wrote: [ -> ]There is no difference