ClearType FAQ

On Windows 7:

1.	In the Control Panel (Category view), select 'Appearance and Personalization'
2.	Under Fonts, select 'Adjust ClearType text'
3.	Follow the instructions on your screen to adjust your ClearType settings

On Windows Vista:

1.	In the Control panel, under 'Appearance and Personalization', select 'Customize color'
2.	Select 'Effects'
3.	To turn on Cleartype, check the box for 'Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts', then select 'ClearType' in the dropdown list
4.	Close the Effects dialog by clicking 'OK' and click 'Apply' to complete the process
5.	Tune ClearType to your own personal preference using the ClearType Web interface or downloadable PowerToy Tuner. Tuning ClearType makes an adjustment to the 'contrast' or 'gamma' value set for your screen.

On Windows XP:

NOTE: Original Equipment Manufacturers that pre-install Windows have the option of setting the ClearType default to on or off. If you install Windows yourself, ClearType will be turned on by default on Windows 7 and Windows Vista and turned off by default on Windows XP.

ClearType is a form of sub-pixel font rendering that draws text using a pixel's red-green-blue (RGB) components separately instead of using the entire pixel. When the pixel is used in this way, horizontal resolution theoretically increases 300 percent.

Picture elements on an LCD screen are actually comprised of individual horizontally-oriented red, green and blue sub-pixels. For instance, an LCD screen that has a display resolution of 800x600 pixels actually has 2400x600 individual sub-pixels. The human eye is not capable of differentiating colors on such a small scale, so a combination of these three primary colors can emulate any intermediate color. Sub-pixel font rendering takes advantage of this by antialiasing at the sub-pixel level instead of at the pixel level.

For more information, see our What is ClearType page. For a technical overview of how ClearType works, see this Microsoft research paper written by John Platt.

No two screens are exactly the same and everyone perceives color in a slightly different way.

To see if your screen is set to its native resolution, try looking at the following eye test image. The image is made up of many vertical black lines. If you see alternating bands of white running vertically through this image, you are probably running at a non-native resolution.

This page has more information on how to set your screen resolution on Windows XP and information on setting your screen resolution in Vista can be found here.

Yes. Settings are saved for each user account.

Windows includes several technologies to render text on the screen. These include Windows GDI, Direct Write and Windows Presentation Foundation. Windows GDI is limited to using one set of ClearType settings per system while the other two support different settings per display.

ClearType works best on color LCD screens, but there are various things to check depending on the type of screen you are using:

Yes, but less so than with LCD displays. Because a standard cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen uses an electron beam to activate pixels, ClearType does not provide the same benefits that you experience on an LCD screen. However, because ClearType still applies a form of filtering similar to traditional antialiasing, you may see some improvement when enabling ClearType on a CRT screen.

It depends. Most LCD screens have a RGB striping order. A very small number have a striping order of BGR. The image below shows side-by-side examples of text rendered with RGB or BGR ordering. If the BGR example looks better on your screen, then your screen may be using a BGR striping order.

Support for BGR displays was added to Windows XP with Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Type designers can license our Visual TrueType (VTT) font hinting tool. VTT was updated to let designers proof their fonts under ClearType. Information on licensing VTT can be found here.

Yes. In May 2001, Microsoft received its first ClearType patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Other patent applications are pending. Developers looking to license Microsoft ClearType patents should visit our ClearType patent licensing site.