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I assume that the operating system detects whether I have LCD or CRT, so it can select the allowed antialiasing methods?

I want to get rid of this "brilliant" antialiasing for x-axis, called subpixel rendering. It does not work. My eyes can pick up the color differences too well, so looking at the text is like looking at rainbow (if I am allowed to exaggerate a little). It just looks ugly and confusing.

There is nothing wrong with my screen. Mostly the problem is the program itself that generates that antialiasing: some look better, some worse. Even now, while writing this text, I can see it having colorful edges, from 53cm distance.

(I don't believe in subpixel rendering anyway because in the future the screens will be better and cannot function in such way anymore because they will not have separate R,G,B lights anymore.)

If you don't know what I'm talking about here is illustration taken from FireFox on Windows 7 on this page:

enter image description here

This is basically how it looks to my eyes, even when resized to normal size.

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  • If I may, you might want to give MacType a shot if you decide to ditch Cleartype. It uses Freetype and replaces the Windows font renderer.
    – Vinayak
    Aug 31, 2014 at 13:59
  • @Vinayak, unfortunately it didnt really look any better, and the CRT option just made it worse (on black background the font was a lot darker).
    – Rookie
    Aug 31, 2014 at 14:29
  • You can try creating a new profile with your custom settings. It uses Freetype so sub-pixel rendering is disabled by default.
    – Vinayak
    Aug 31, 2014 at 14:37
  • In the future screens will be better but not like removing RGB channels? There are many screens which don't use RGB like pentile, RGBW (white) or RGBY (yellow) but they all later become obsolete or much less common than before. It's not easy to force Windows to use grayscale anti-aliasing if you don't like MacType and the default windows font renderer even after many careful adjustments and calibrating. If you use Firefox, it uses DirectWrite so using Mactype doesn't solve that and you must change it with addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/…
    – phuclv
    Nov 8, 2014 at 12:46

1 Answer 1

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What you are wanting to do is to disable Cleartype. This will disable the subpixel rendering.

Go to Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Display then click Adjust Cleartype text from the options on the left.

This will open a new window for Cleartype calibration. The first screen should have an option to turn off Cleartype.

Uncheck that box and you should now have all of the font smoothing disabled.

Once you've turned it off you might need to reset your computer to change the setting for Windows itself (though a lot of applications might change immediately).


It would appear that there is a second type of font smoothing available Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7: Bi-level font smoothing as opposed to Cleartype.

This appears to be highly font-specific and as implied by that blog post requires a lot of extra information in the font to be used to hint at smoothing. It seems to disable anti-aliasing for some fonts and leave it for others. In general it looks annoying.

No Smoothing at all:

enter image description here

Bi-Level Smoothing (cleartype disabled):

enter image description here

(Notice that some text is anti-aliased and some is not)

Cleartype:

enter image description here

In order to change the font smoothing go to System and Security –> System –> Advanced System Settings –> Performance (Settings…)

enter image description here


As an alternative I would recommend going through the Cleartype calibration and finding a setting that works best for you. Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Display then click Adjust Cleartype text and work your way through, it might just be that your subpixel type (BGR/RGB) is wrong and doing the calibration may help you.

It would also appear that according to How to turn off ClearType and use whole-pixel anti-aliasing in Windows 7? between font sizes of 7-13pt that whole pixel anti-aliasing is disabled. This would corroborate what I saw above where some fonts are smoothed where other are not.

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  • When i turn it off, it disables antialiasing completely, i dont want that. I cant seem to disable subpixel rendering only. The effect i want for my fonts is basically same as applying gray scale colors on these subpixel rendered fonts, so it loses all the rainbow colors but remains antialiased.
    – Rookie
    Aug 31, 2014 at 14:05
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    @Rookie I've added a bunch of information but I'm not sure you can properly achieve what you want.
    – Mokubai
    Aug 31, 2014 at 14:31
  • "(Notice that some text is anti-aliased and some is not)" Yes i noticed this problem before, is there any fix to it?
    – Rookie
    Sep 2, 2014 at 13:40

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