A heathen's thoughts on antialiasing and font legibility

[sciphre]

There's something bugging me - I don't like antialiased fonts.
Cry more, you'll say. Freak! you'll say.

Let me explain - I feel that the obvious loss of sharpness of the characters when you enable even the best of antialiasing techniques (ClearType, or subpixel smoothing with Full hinting) fully negates the benefit of the nicer shapes, making the text much harder to read. It's definitely prettier, though.

This only gets worse on coloured backgrounds.
As of a couple of months ago, I've disabled all antialiasing of fonts in both XP and GNOME. I'm happy with the results, except if the font's hinting is lousy.
I use the Microsoft web fonts package for their impeccable hinting (Arial, Verdana).

Am I alone? Discuss!

[Zelmo]

I agree that sharpness is more important than prettiness, but on my laptop the fonts looked so ragged without antialiasing that I had to use something. I fiddled around with all the settings I could find, and settled on full sub-pixel RGB hinting.

[sciphre]

I agree with that feeling, when i first changed my CRT for a spiffy new LCD i was horrified by the look of the non-antialiased text ("standard" AA doesn't do anything in windows for a LCD) ... looked so jaggy.
I thought Cleartype was the best thing since butter toast, installed other apps to tweak the alpha a bit to make it clearer, was very happy with it.

Then one day i had to work overtime a lot... came to a stage of tired where the damn fuzziness of the edges was giving me a headache. Turned it off.
Ever since, I haven't been able to turn it back on, it just looks fiendishly difficult to read.
For small fonts it doesn't work because they "fill up" and also become slightly transparent because of the subpixel rendering. For large fonts it doesn't matter.

I hope this clarifies my position a tad

[techieMoe]

So... I'm confused. Why are you calling yourself a heathen?

[sciphre]

Because of my lack of the accepted monotheistic religion of font smoothing

[burntfuse]

Personally, I like the 100dpi fonts (bitmapped, right?) the best, since they're much sharper than the vector fonts.