PocketMatrix

I know that "ClearType" is a Microsoft trademark. Is it okay for anyone to use ClearType in their app if they figure out how to use that undocumented feature of the OS? I know XP officially exposes it to developers, so I suppose it is fine to use it in CE.

Dan East

What exactly is clear type anyway?

ClearType is the font smoothing system used by (among other things) Microsoft Reader.

Basically, it treats the red, green and blue chanels of each pixel as seperate pixels situated next to each other horizontally. For a more detailed explanation, look on http://www.gbadev.org/ I think there is one there (look down the page a ways, it was posted a while ago).

cleartype is the technology used to make text on pocketpcs look antialaised, it is used by the reader and you can switch it on in the registry for the internet explorer.
the trick is that cleartype puts different colored pixels around the letter to make it look round and stuff. pretty cool stuff. courier looks awful with cleartype though...
-Shape

I wouldn't be surprised if MS already has a patent on this and has many more pending. You won't have a problem if the OS supports it and you just enable it for your app. You will run into trouble if you implement the algorithm yourself for your commercial gain. I'm no lawyer (thank God) but you will certainly want to talk to one if you choose this route.

Steve Gibson has a good explanation of how it works on his site:

And here's a bit from one of the MSR guys:

NB: Just found this:

No, I'm not implementing it. I figured out how to have the OS render fonts in ClearType. I suppose someone with the XP SDK could have figured it out much easier than I did with trial and error. The current DEXplor beta already supports it, and it looks nice. No additional performance penalties as far as I can tell.

Dan East

Wow, Dan. That Dex-plor file explorer is the best file explorer I've ever seen, even for PC. Don't quit now! If you continue enhancing Dex-plor, then it will probably eventually get distributed with some new Pocket PCs. I hope the best for you!

Digby, I just checked out that last link your provided. Some of the examples looked fantastic on my laptop's LCD display. Anyone know if W2k supports ClearType natively? I know someone came up with a program to allow you to specify a window's transparency in W2k - basically it just enables a capability the OS already has. It would be nice if ClearType could be "turned on" in a similar manner.

Here's one of the comparisons from that article. If you are viewing this on an LCD display you will see a huge improvement with the second image.





Dan East

It's interesting, even though I have a CRT display, cleartype text seems to look much better. I don't think my monitor has the horizontal color dots (a highly technical term) (It's an optiquest Q95). My question is, do CRT monitors with their triangular dots still benefit if the ordering of the colors is constant?

I think that example that dan found was pretty lame. The original font is the ugliest font I've ever seen. I've turned my cleartype off in Windows XP. It was starting to get annoying, and as a web developer, I need to see what things look like on other peoples computers.

Personally I've found clear-type to be hard on my eyes. Then again, I also turn the refresh rate as high as I can since anything at 75 or below gives me massive headaches and 60 and below I can see the damn refresh.

-Hosed

You know, the more I closely study the two examples above, the more I feel the comparison is biased by their choice of font. Certainly ClearType helps hide the jagged edges, but take a close look at the before and after. The main thing is that the font they chose renders very poorly at the small point size they used for comparison. That causes some portions of the strokes to be thicker than others, which doesn't look very good (take a look at the "lumps" on the lower-case "n"). A different font, specifically designed for high quality at smaller point sizes, would look much better in the first place. That is one of the main reasons the ClearType version looks so much better. In the ClearType rendering, the font would have been rendered 3 times larger (otherwise ClearType would not have had the detail to work with). That corrects the limitations of that particular font, which again, renders poorly at a small point size.

Dan East

I took so long to get around to typing my post in that 2 people replied in the mean time.

Dan East