typographical pain

So yeah, at work I finally got Parallels installed for purposes of screaming at IE's rendering bugs. I'm still trying to tell my imaginary Windows XP box to look at the Mac's localhost, so I'm browsing stuff on Safari, then occasionally having to open the same page on IE to actually download something. Which made me notice...



Holy shit, you Windows people still live in the fucking eighties in terms of text rendering. I mean, what the fuck? Look, I know this virtual machine probably has no idea what kind of LCD monitor it's displaying on, but this default text is about as pretty as what I was greeted with when I turned on my Amiga. There's supposedly that 'Cleartype' thing in WIndows but I sure as hell can't find a switch to turn it on in the system prefs. Even in a shitty jpeg the Mac's out-of-the-box text rendering kicks Windows' text's ass.

(And I just managed to get it to see my localhost. Turns out Bonjour doesn't want to advertise the existence of my alternate Apache under MAMP unless I have the built-in Apache turned on.)

edit: Thanks to everyone who told me that system-wide text anti-aliasing is controlled by a defaults-to-off switch hidden in the 'effects' section of the 'display' prefs. "Effects"? Sheesh. Why isn't this on by default? Windows. Feh.

sketchbook

This is what I did today while I was waiting for the guy from the Museum's IT department to install Parallels on my work machine.

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