Anti-aliasing - smooth font edges - under Windows

when anti-aliasing doesn't work in Windows 98:

Times New Roman in Shell 1.1.2

when anti-aliasing does work in Windows 98:
my own handwriting font in Acrobat Reader 5:

click for a closer view

Font smoothing is also known as 'anti-aliasing': I haven't yet seen an explanation why, except that Michael Peirce writes

"Aliasing is the stair-step jagged edges effect you see ... Anti-aliasing removes or greatly diminishes this effect".

( Smoothie User's Guide)

I'm still trying to get a clear overall picture of how and when anti-aliasing does and doesn't work under different versions of Windows.

I have Windows 98 as a window on my Mac, I've selected "smooth edges of screen fonts" in the control panel Display/Effects; and Jim Felici tells me that that ought to

"smooth the appearance of screen type by using gray pixels as well as black ones to render the type."

click for a close-up!

But it quite obviously doesn't do that - with one exception, everything is still just black in the several programmes I've just tested: Microsoft Works, WordPerfect, Print Shop Deluxe, iShell, MovieWorks.

The exception is Adobe Acrobat 5: the example here is of my handwriting font (thumbnail - top left of this page), but it's equally smooth with other fonts, of course. I thought this showed that the problem wasn't that Win98 couldn't do anti-aliasing at all, but then I read that Acrobat is one of the Adobe programmes which have their own font smoothing function ... (in the ReadMe for ATM Light 4.6.2 for Mac)

It seems that the light version of Adobe Type Manager is supposed to smooth PostScript fonts on screen (Acrobat is a PostScript program), but that to handle TrueType fonts, you have to get the Deluxe version at $70.

Another variant is to be found in a programme like MovieWorks, which uses Apple's QuickTime technology for font smoothing; but even after v.6, the world is still waiting for QT for Windows to handle this.

Do contact me if you know more about this ...