More about Cleartype

Do you remember this post? There I mentioned how Cleartype was a lot better when I selected the BGR option. Today I found why in this article.

ClearType manipulates the Red-Green-Blue sub-pixels directly. The order in which these sub-pixels occur is called striping. The default striping for most LCD displays is RGB (in other words, Red followed by Green followed by Blue). In both Vista and XP, ClearType assumes by default that it is dealing with RGB striping and happily tweaks the pixel components using this assumption. Unfortunately for some of us, the default striping on some (many? all?) 7" UMPC displays is BGR (Blue, Green, Red – inverse of RGB). When you run Vista (or turn on XP-ClearType) on these BGR machines, instead of crisp, clear text, you get fuzzy, multi-colored, rainbow-fringed text! To a sensitive eye like mine, this basically sucks. The good news is that ClearType can handle BGR striping just as well as RGB striping – but you have to tell it to do soJ. The bad news is that there is no inbuilt UI in either XP or Vista to tweak this settingL. But the really good news is that you can run the ClearType Tuner from the Microsoft Typography web site to fix this. Run, don’t walk. (This tuner has recently been updated for Vista. Hooray!)