Cleartype compatibility with Adobe Fonts in Windows Vista

Font smoothing never was Microsoft’s forte, even the not-so-old Windows XP boasted of horrible font renderation, let alone other fancy stuffs. While on the other side, being hailed from Desktop Publishing front, Apple brought richer font smoothing experience in Mac line of operating systems. MS decided to change the course of game with its ‘Cleartype’ technology, first applied OS wide in Windows Vista.

Now Cleartype is good at an initial look and performs fine with Microsoft approved Cleartype enabled fonts. But things are not the same always with other fonts and could become rather disappointing to work with in Windows Vista. For example, graphic designers swear by Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator etc and they come with a great number of fonts included in installer. Many of these fonts are used in Desktop Publishing industry and needs to be perfectly rendered. Surprisingly Cleartype is pawned here with just providing ‘standard’ font smoothing to them. Unavailability of Sub-Pixel Rendering kills the pleasant feeling of them and easily convert them into death screams for a graphic designer. Fonts like Myriad Pro, Lucida Family fonts appear horribly jittery in Wordpad and throughout various MS Office apps.

Microsoft apps showed this type of font distortion

The actual interpretation of Myriad Pro in Adobe Photoshop CS4

Digging through the problem seemed impossible at first, with almost no resources available easily at hand to get answered on this specific problem. But finally it turned out that poor Cleartype cannot handle OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines and thus produce horrible results in Microsoft’s own applications. Thankfully Adobe CS3 & now CS4 products have their own style of anti-aliasing fonts and they don’t mess with Cleartype. That’s why we are still getting right font renderation just within those apps.

Mac OS X does not suffer from these types of problems though and follow a healthy guideline of anti-aliasing. Some people often criticize Apple for ‘heavy use of font smoothing’ in almost all of its apps, but I don’t think that is justified. Granted that they are not quite Godlike foolproof in every area but end user experience is undoubtedly better with their technique. One cannot find fonts without anti-aliasing in Mac OS X now, even Terminal provides it. Can we even think this with Command Prompt in Windows now, which does not even provide font customization? Microsoft can’t guard their turf by just saying that Cleartype is a new technology and has some newbie flaws that need to be fixed. I don’t want to criticize MS more in this, just want to present a small plea to them. Try to improve with the basics first MS, provide a richer desktop experience with fixing its glitches and not just with fancy window borders.

I hope along with upcoming Windows 7, Microsoft will be able enough in clearing these minor yet important shortcomings. There are a group of people who prefers Mac on top of Windows for Graphic related works; if MS want them back in Windows stream, Windows 7 must be the important key to get rid of these snags.