Another difficult Windows UI experience: enabling ClearType
Figuring out how to enable ClearType, the fancy method Windows uses to nicely anti-alias fonts on the screen so that they don’t look all blocky, was fairly simple, but the option is in a non-intuitive location.
- First you have to open the ‘Display’ control panel.
- Then click the ‘Appearance’ tab.
- You might think there’d be a dropdown menu for ‘Text Antialiasing’ right under the one for ‘Font size’, but you’d be wrong. You are far too logical for this work.
- You might think that the option would show up if you were to click the ‘Advanced’ button. That’s a good thought, because it makes sense to someone in Redmond to hide options behind buttons in tabs, but you’d be wrong again. Not there.
- You have to click the ‘Effects…’ button to get to the ClearType setting. I kid you not. ClearType apparently doesn’t belong in the badly named ‘Settings’ tab (it would more accurately be titled ‘Hardware Settings’), nor is it an ‘Advanced’ setting in the ‘Appearance’ tab, but is instead classified as an Appearance ‘Effect’. I only found it because I was doing the exhaustive search that is apparently required to find any setting in the apps and control panels that ship with Windows.
Gripe gripe gripe. I know there are many good people up there at Microsoft, which makes it even more difficult to understand how the UI can get so muddled. At least it works and text does look a lot nicer now that it’s enabled.
