While playing around with my Control Panel settings, I find something interesting under Control Panel > Display > "Appearance" tab > "Effects..." button. The second checklist item in the Effects dialog box reads: "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:" Beneath that is a menu with two choices: "Standard" and "ClearType." It's defaulted to the former, so I try the latter for kicks.

Whoa. Interesting. It's considerably de-pixelated everything, to the extent of being—yes, I must admit it—a bit Mac-like. A very few fonts (Arial, Trebuchet MS) look fantastic; luckily, they're the ones I spend the majority of my time staring at. Eudora, AIM+, and all of the Windows menus use Arial, and they've become a thousand times prettier. Joy and good tidings on those counts.

Serif and fixed-width fonts, though, are pretty skittish. Serif fonts are used by most of the major news sources I read, and Times New Roman is looking ugly as Ceasar (Karla's bulldog... hee... and, yes, his vowels are reversed). It's especially bad at Slashdot, where they use italicized TNR for quoted text. That ClearTyped text looks better in MSIE than in Mozilla at present is somewhat of a letdown (it seems that the former has a nicer height-to-width proportion), but I haven't yet fully investigated font size options so am not giving up hope!

I've also been seeing a lot of fixed-width text of late. Most of these were designed with pixelization in mind; in fact, they were optimized to be pixelated. Now, with ClearType, they simply become blurry to the point of being myopic. In Samson (Stanford's secure telnet client), flipping the background and foreground colors, resulting in white text on a black background, cuts down the blurriness by a bunch. The same thing is probably also possible in VisualC++ and CodeWarrior, but am not sure whether that's winning or compromising. =P

So, haven't yet decided whether or not I like it. Most likely just a matter of a different threshold of tolerance that I need to adopt, not necessarily a higher one. [Update, three hours later: It's growing quickly on me.]

On another note, Happy White Christmas! Four or five inches of big, fat, slushy flakes at present, and another spate predicted to hit around midnight. Off I go to shovel...