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No, I am not trying to start a flame war. :-)

I understand, that this is purely matter of taste. Both Joel & Jeff have stated their opinions on the matter. I for one love the way the Mac displays fonts and whenever trying to read a longer text on my PC I get frustrated and employ a hack:

  • print it into OneNote - apparently the act of printing it changes the algorithm used and the resulting picture has a much better look (makes kind of sense due to the different resolution).

What I really want is to have the Apple Font Rendering used everywhere in Windows. Currently I use the ClearType Tuning PowerToy to crank up the thickness of the font to the max, but I am not really satisfied. The above mentioned articles from Joel & Jeff explain why that is.

So basically I am looking for an alternative to ClearType. I do not mind spending money for it if it works. Any recommendations?

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To achieve this you can use GDI++, which is an application that renders the fonts on Windows applications with GDI instead of the typical ClearType.

Usage without trayicon: Just drag and drop your favourite application to gdi++.exe. Native Windows controls are also now in effect.

Usage with trayicon: Just right-click the trayicon and select Enable.

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Thank you! I will try that right away. – Sven Semmler Aug 3 '09 at 1:23
Wow, I just tried it, and I think it's working. Text actually looks bearable! I had been quarantined to my MacBook for a while because it was a pain to read on my Computer. ClearType didn't seem to do much. I still have ClearType on in conjunction with this and it looks great. Going to keep running it for a while to see if I run into any issues. Thanks though. – Jorge Israel Peña Aug 3 '09 at 2:09
Something I noticed in Visual Studio was that scrolling up and down lagged a bit, but I think this is a great little thing that I can choose to turn on when necessary, and I can live with a little bit of lag if it makes everything a whole lot more readable! – Jorge Israel Peña Aug 3 '09 at 2:14
This is awesome! – Sven Semmler Aug 3 '09 at 2:54
This approach is somewhat buggy with some applications and has problems with 64-bit Windows, but other than that it's very nice. – Sasha Chedygov Feb 24 '10 at 5:27
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