How to turn off ClearType and use whole-pixel anti-aliasing in Windows 7?
In Windows XP, you can have whole-pixel anti-aliasing by setting "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" to "Standard", or have sub-pixel anti-aliasing (for LCD monitors) by setting the option to "ClearType".
In Windows 7, I can no longer find a way to enable whole-pixel anti-aliasing, which gives the best readability on DLP projectors and CRT monitors (these screens do not follow the RGB or BGR pattern found in LCD screens). It is either ClearType or no anti-aliasing at all. I tried a 3rd party tool (ClearType Switch) but unchecking "Use ClearType" while leaving "Enable smooth edges for screen fonts" checked disables all forms of anti-aliasing.
How to turn off ClearType and use whole-pixel anti-aliasing in Windows 7?
Edit: According to Microsoft's blog article "Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7", enabling "Smooth edges of screen fonts" in Performance Options and disabling ClearType with ClearType Tuner would give you grayscale font smoothing (i.e. what I want). However, this is simply not true. It disables all forms of anti-aliasing (or, in their terminology, it gives you bi-level rendering).
And to clarify, I'm talking about changing the system default setting, i.e. the one that would be used if the application do not specify its own.
Solution 1:
To use whole-pixel antialiasing:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000001
Note that most Windows fonts are specifically set not to smooth1 at normal (7-13) sizes (fareast fonts even disable cleartype at those sizes).
To disable antialiasing altogether:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="0"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000000
To reenable clear type:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
Registry settings taken from an XP machine.
1Above 9 PPEM, anti-aliasing is turned off until the main stems of the font are around two pixels wide, which is around 13 to 20 points, depending on the typeface. (…) Two pixel wide stems are usually chosen because there is usually enough “backbone” of foreground colored pixels to keep the stem contrast high. (…) So although font smoothing was the default, most fonts, when displaying text at typical reading sizes, would render them bi-level.
Solution 2:
I have found a solution to this problem, and it is highly customizable. It's called MacType.
It allow you to change the font rendering of all programs that I tried, selectively or en masse.
It has a number of default profiles to choose from, or you can make your own with a wizard that allows you to fine-tune just about every aspect of the rendering, including of course the choice of grey scale rendering.
It even runs inside Sandboxie so you can try it without worry about what it might do to your system.
I've only been using it for ten minutes so I don't know how stable it is but for now I'm extremely happy to have found this.
Solution 3:
In addition to following @kinokijuf and if you want to avoid issues like this:
You'll also need to uninstall IE9, IE10, or IE11. Only IE8 will restore embedded web-control objects (the services description in the Extended view of the Service Control Manager) back to their original default non-font-smoothed counterparts.