Linnut screen shots 10742
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You are right, ClearType is not active on default XP installation, which is understandable: TFT flat panels were certainly not the norm when the OS shipped, back in 2001 (ClearType was invented in 1998)
That said, nothing prevents an OEM, shipping a complete system with TFT display, to turn it on and tune it.
Moreover the fonthintingworks perfectly well in Windows since the introduction of TrueType, back in 1991 if I recall correctly and, believe it or not, font hinting does more for readability than font smoothing and it is also much more difficult to do, as hints and kerned pairs must be tuned for every sizes.
Well, not exactly. There have been user-space thread implementations, but Linux invented a alternative route, where the LinuxThreads library used the clone() system call to make threads that were essentially processes that shared...
Last, but not least and from what I understand Linux font smoothing does "resolution enhancement" using shades of gray to smooth out the edges, while ClearType does "infinite resolution" by usingcoloredpixels, translating to "infinite" shades.
Researchers seems to agrees: it works!
And just when you think the OSS community will not take long to catch up, MS comes with an improved version:
You must be talking of a 1985 Mac. Windows is decades ahead of Linux and this won't change anytime soon.