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.

Please make a way to turn off the font smoothing! I think existing smoothing is very poor.

 lets continue with the current fonts....

asp net web development

 "A lot of people comment that our text looks really good without requiring ClearType"

who are these people? Everyone i show asks why all the fonts look blurry and bold. fix this or at least let me turn aliasing off.

 Yup text looks TERRIBLE. This needs to be fixed. Just look at the amount of views on this topic...People want this addressed.

I would love to see ClearType support as well.

Mike 

Mark Rideout:

A lot of people comment that our text looks really good without requiring ClearType.

LOOKS GOOD??? May be these people are blind? Unfortunately Silverlight's text rendering is ugly. So ClearType support is needed.

Alexander Manenko:

So ClearType support is needed

Implementing ClearType would take some work; on the other hand a switch that would disable the blurry text (aka ClearType wanna-be) would be much easier. I can't believe after so many complained about this nothing happened. Is Microsoft really listening or just pretending?

P.S. I would prefer a way to disable the anti-aliasing rather than ClearType.

I'm not sure what those that are saying that even WPF font rendering looks well are smoking. WPF and Silverlight both have serious text rendering issues (except the WPF reader which is very nice - but plain control and input text is horrible).

I don't use ClearType on my machine for physical reasons and without it WPF and Silverlight look absolutely horrid. But even with ClearType turned on it doesn't get much better. Text is still blurry and the anti-aliasing blurs out noticably.

Put up any Windows Forms app next to a WPF/Silverlight app and compare the sharpness of font rendering and the difference should be quite clear especially at smaller text sizes (10pt and smaller).

This has been one of the big reasons I've been very hesitant to even implement anything in WPF. I have a number heavy text centric applications and a degradation in text quality is just not an option.

 +++ Rick ---

Rick Strahl
West Wind Technologies
Making waves on the Web
www.west-wind.com/weblog

Mark Rideout:

ClearType is not a feature that we are planning on adding for a while. We currently perform gray-scale antialiasing with gamma correction. A lot of people comment that our text looks really good without requiring ClearType. Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed? Any examples would help.

Thanks!

-mark
Program Manager
Microsoft
This post is provided "as-is"

 surely you haven't read this thread titled "Why do Fonts Look so Horrible in Silverlight?"

Regards,
Nathan Brouwer

http://www.nathanbrouwer.nl

rstrahl:

I'm not sure what those that are saying that even WPF font rendering looks well are smoking

Mark - font rendering quality is not a functional requirement. With all due respect, If you are thinking only of features and functions you will never beat Flash. Please talk to some professional designers, or some UI experts. Design matters a lot to the user experience. Ask someone on the Blend team if they would be happy having their UI rendered in Silverlight. Are the Times Reader people happy with Silverlight rendering?

Regards, Jonathan

Mark Rideout:

Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed?

 Font rendering quality is a functional requirement. This is not a pretty pictures tool. This is a programming tool for developers that happens to provide really great candy that graphic designers can make use of. However if no one can read the text or it looks like a two year old made the text, it can't be used for functional applications and the only thing it will be used for is designers to create pretty pictures that slide across the screen.

 And guess what? If that's what it's going to be used for, they ain't going to use Silverlight, they will use Flash because they're used to Adobe tools.  Get with it. This is not flash, this is .NET Winforms ++++ in a web browser. The primary use for Silverlight will be line of business applications, chat engines, and Web 2.0 applications. All of which make huge use of text.

 If it can't do text and make it look marginally passible, then there is point in bothering with silverlight because NO ONE WILL USE AN APPLICATION YOU DEVELOP WITH IT.

PERIOD.

 Again, get with it. Stop making excuses and fix this mess or risk losing all of the interest that you garnered from developers. (I'm sure there are 10s of thousands of developers that have played, looked at the text and went "YUK, I can't sell this!" and walked away.)

Mark Rideout:

Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed? Any examples would help.

Thanks!

-mark
Program Manager
Microsoft
This post is provided "as-is"

 Of course you are right. But calm down. Of course it's sad if they lose all the possibilities that lay within Silverlight. But it's their problem, at last. ;)

Remember, ClearType isn't about making the font look good, it's about making text more readable. I think on this subject, the Silverlight team needs to go into their Microsoft directory and ping Bill Hill on it. Bring him in for a meeting/consult. He helped invent ClearType and should shed some light as to why Silverlight needs it. He's on the IE team right now but I'd think he'd be happy to give you a talking to :)

 In all honesty, I couldn't give less about cleartype. I'd rather see a normal readable font for one. After that, there's allways room for cleartype. IMO Cleartype can't be a workaround for a lesser font rendering engine...

Regards,
Nathan Brouwer

http://www.nathanbrouwer.nl

we are using Silk Test from Borland to test our Silverlight application. Silk Test does not yet support testing Silverlight applications natively so we are trying to use an OCR interface. Unfortunately the text rendering is not clear in Silverlight so the OCR cannot recognize the text. We're hoping that ClearText will fix this problem

-thad

Development Manager

AZPM Consulting

According to this post, Silverlight 3 will have ClearType rendering (in final release, not the beta). Yay!