Disable anti-aliasing for some fonts in Windows 8

How do you disable anti-aliasing for only some font names in Windows 8? Specifically, I like to use Terminus which is an awesome coding font, but looks like garbage when rendered with ClearType and anti-aliasing.

Björn Lindqvist

Posted 2013-01-15T08:43:25.860

Reputation: 321

Entire machine preferably. Currently some programs render without anti-aliasing such as Emacs and some with such as X-Chat 2. Visual studio 2012 renders without, but with different glyphs for certain characters like "a". It's a mess. – Björn Lindqvist – 2013-01-15T09:04:09.063

No, it doesn't deal with configuration on a per-font basis. – Björn Lindqvist – 2013-01-15T09:15:19.057

Some applications allow you to control whether to use anti-aliasing or not, at least it's possible when font is created in the application, yet most applications use the default setting. Some fonts may not support anti-aliasing. – Alexey Ivanov – 2013-01-16T07:50:45.647

Answers

I don't think this can be done by font directly from the OS and as such, my answer is not a direct answer but an answer if all else fails!

You can make it a system wide change which doesn't do it by software (but does turn it off or on), then see this related article (code below quoted)

To disable antialiasing altogether:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

"FontSmoothing"="0"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000000

Dave

Posted 2013-01-15T08:43:25.860

Reputation: 24 199

1"It can't be done" is also an answer I suppose. :) – Björn Lindqvist – 2013-01-15T15:14:25.577

This can actually be done, just not natively with Windows. You'll need to use a different font rendering platform, such as FreeType (used by Linux). The easiest way I know to get FreeType in Windows is to use a program called MacType. It will allow you to use different rendering settings for different fonts.

Unfortunately, FreeType is not hardware accelerated, unlike DirectWrite. And it is not the most userfriendly of programs, just the most userfriendly of the FreeType rendering programs. If it does not interest you, you may wish to look at the Code Project survey of monospace fonts for alternatives to Terminus.

trlkly

Posted 2013-01-15T08:43:25.860

Reputation: 1 236