I notice ClearType is not working for text in Silverlight, either in IE or FF. Hope that's on the list. - Jonathan
 

Thanks for the answer, Mark.

It's just that I am designing a UI with a lot of text, and I've drunk the ClearType Kool-Aid. Most people never notice the difference, but *I* do. Maybe I should just get over it. But WPF font rendering is so sweet...

FWIW, Apollo doesn't do subpixel antialiasing either, though of course Flash does. 

Jonathan
 

Yea, I'd throw my vote in with having ClearType too; it does make quite a difference. Sure, some people will say things look good, but some don't notice if their LCD screen is running at the wrong resolution :). But when I've showed people (on XP) by turning it on, I've gotten several wows.

-Michael

Add my vote too! I just can't turn the feature off.  Doesn't look right on my lap top without it now.

Cheers

RJ
the choreography of sight and sound

Gotta agree with that sentiment, ClearType would be much appreciated. 

My eyesight is good, and I find going back to standard anti-aliasing quite irritating and distracting.

ClearType makes even more of a difference when using DVI with a TFT panel rather than DSUB.

Lack of ClearType is definitely one major point in favour of Windows over Mac, bring it on for SilverLight, please!!

I too agree with the ClearType sentiment. I know font appearance is highly subjective, but to me the Silverlight text looks awful on all of the monitors I've seen it on. (It reminds me of Safari text which looks just as bad.) I've tried all kinds of font/size combinations in Silverlight and they all hurt my eyes. Light text on dark background may be somewhat better.

I can understand not using ClearType on Silverlight for cross-platform purposes, but if that's the case, please consider disabling your smoothing algorithm altogether.

Also, does the existing algorithm make any "subpixel" assumptions? If so, it's going to vary (sometimes quite significantly) from monitor to monitor and won't make much sense without being user-configurable (like ClearType's tuning wizard).
 

ClearType font rendering really makes a noticable difference when you are rendering small size fonts. Using the GDI+ api I could make text rendered using Verdana readable down to 7pt size. In SilverLight, the text really looks bad when it is under 11pt. This is a serious problem for porting older UI components over to Silverlight, since now the text has to take up more room to be readable by the user.

 I join the rest of this thread in asking for ClearType support in SilverLight.