You really do learn something everyday. Today I learned that I need no longer scowl enviously at Mac users for their curvaceous, soft and buttery smooth text. I’m talking anti-aliasing here, and it’s what turns the jaggy harsh edges of digital text into a vaseline smeared vision of loveliness.

Apple users have had it good, Macs have been supporting anti-aliased text for a while, and I always thought PC users got the bum steer in that department, but apparently not.

Windows XP has been able to do it all the time with a function called ClearType, but it seems as if nobody told me, or many other people, because most of us don’t even know about it. And it’s a doddle to get up and running.

Here’s how:

1. Open up your XP control panel and select Appearance and Themes
2. Now select Display followed by Appearance
3. Click on Effects
4. Under where it says Use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts select ClearType from the drop down menu
5. Sit back and wonder why you didn’t know about this before, cause that’s it
   
   

You can even tweak the setings to get it just right apparently, but it looked fine for me straight off the bat.

Try it out, you’ll see an dramatic difference in the appearance of text on your machine.