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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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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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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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  • 1
    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, 2009 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, 2009 at 2:14
  • This is awesome!
    – Sven
    Aug 3, 2009 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, 2010 at 5:27
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GDI++ is rather old and not compatible with many software such as Google Chrome. It doesn't work on Windows 8 and above either. Mactype is much more better and is still in active development. It supports both GDI and DirectWrite apps and has many more tuning options to make the result suits you.

mactype profile

mactype option

What's new?

  • Win10 compatible
  • Updated FreeType (up to git commit 0c4feb72cf976f63d4bf62436bc48f190d0e0c28)
  • Support for color fonts 😎
  • New installer
  • Lots of bug fixes
  • Updates for multi-monitor support
  • Tray app can intercept explorer in Service Mode now
  • Tweaks for diacritics
  • Updates to EasyHook
  • Lower CPU in Tray Mode
  • Better DirectWrite support thanks to しらいと[http://silight.hatenablog.jp]
  • Separate DirectWrite parameter adjustment
  • Traditional Chinese localization greatly improved thanks to GT Wang
  • English localization improved
  • Added Korea localization, thanks to 조현희
  • MultiLang system improved
  • (Does not include Infinality as this is still experimental)

https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype

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