From crappy to snappy in five steps

Earlier, when I posted What would a 'Kartika Fixed' font for Malayalam, do, exactly?, a few people noticed the screenshot I posted that used the Consolas font (and the Kartika font via Uniscribe font fallback) contained text that looked liked crap:

Yet I claimed to be using a Vista almost RC1 build -- and as has been widely reported since first mentioned in the Terminal Services in Windows Server "Longhorn" Executive Chat, RC1 was going to support ClearType over Terminal Server. So why didn't this text look good?

Well, if you look at the chat, Terminal Server Dev manager Joy Chik said:

ClearType will be available in Vista RC1, it's disabled by default, but you can enable it through the RDP client experience tab. The Host OS is Vista or LH Server, the client is Vista based RDP client on XP or above.

Ah, there is the problem -- I am using the XP SP2 client, not the Vista client installed on XP SP2. But I am not running as an Admin (Aaron would be so proud!), and I am stubborn (translation, lazy).

Luckily for now there is a solution for folks like me, too! :-)

It turns out that although I cannot automatically make ClearType enabled over TS in my scenario, I can turn it on manually. Just

1) right click on the desktop:

2) Choose Personalize:

3) Select Window Color and Appearance:

4) Click on the Effects... button and 5) Click on the Checkbox to enable ClearType:

And then the text that looked crappy will look snappy!

Much better!

Now like I said, this is not a perfect solution, since it won't remember that I did this next time around. My client is not smart enough to ask for ClearType support, so it doesn't. Eventually I will happen to logon as an Admin to be performing some task or I'll use RunAs or some other elevation step, and I'll install the Vista client, probably as soon as I get annoyed about having to turn on ClearType explicitly.

Though for now it is so cool to switch between the crappy and the snappy that I will probably hold off until the novelty wears off....

That is just so freaking cool. If I weren't so lazy I'd go back and fix all my old screenshots! :-)

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