Looking for better font smoothing in Windows 7

[sebaz]

[FONT=Candara, sans-serif]I always preferred the way Mac OS X deals with fonts than the way Windows does. There has been plenty of discussions about this everywhere, so I don't care to start another one, but my question is, is there a way to hack Cleartype to make the fonts look more like OS X? I've done the Cleartype tuner thing several times and I still end up with fonts that are sharp but very thin, except maybe if I choose Segoe UI Semibold as the main font for everything in the system, but the drawback of that is that when the system has to display something in bold, it doesn't switch to Segoe UI Bold, it stays in Semi-Bold. And the same thing happens if I choose the Semi-Bold Segoe UI as the browser font and set it to override the page's default font; when text was set to be bold, it stays in semi-bold.

I've read about the registry settings for Cleartype a few days ago and I played with them, even setting "FontSmoothingGamma" to 25, not noticing any difference from the default of 1000, which is supposed to give the strongest contrast.

So the only other option I've found so far is GDI++, setting it as a start-up item and choosing a preset that makes my fonts look the boldest, but it only works for 32 bit apps, and not even all 32-bit apps can use it, for example, IE8, in its 32 bit version, if GDI++ is on, will make text look even thinner and jagged. But besides, GDI++ is a software from several years ago that was developed in Japan, so the best we have are some old builds with English translations. I would like to find something that works in both 32 and 64 bit, and that is being developed currently.

Any ideas? [/FONT]

 

[willy9x]

I found this while researching GDI++ and installed it. Works well on windows 7

Jaywin says: October 19, 2009 at 13:00
You can get the latest version with the titlebar problems fixed from here.
GDI++ê—pƒAƒbƒvƒ[ƒ_
Just download the largest file.

 

[willy9x]

GDI0909.zip was the file I downloaded and installed.

 

[MiKe092]

Dude Nice find, worthy of a BuMp, works well with windows 7, jus run the gditray.exe within the attachment for quicker sourcing. Looks very good little while to get used to it but wel done i Like Enable an disable from sytem tray to see results.

View attachment Text Smoothing.zip

 

[willy9x]

Thanks, Glad to be able to contribute in exchange for all the great info in these forums;

I experimented with the ini files a little and I tend to use E the most.

 

[Greg S]

Thanks, Glad to be able to contribute in exchange for all the great info in these forums;

I experimented with the ini files a little and I tend to use E the most.

Nice find. Found a seemingly bug though. Open explorer, hover mouse over any detailed item, the underlining of item has been restricted to just the first letter of the item. I can post a screenshot if needed