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Its because of Silk...
Authored by: Basilisk on Aug 02, '02 01:51:44PM

The "Disable Quartz text smoothing" checkbox in Word does completely disable text smoothing. The text still appears antialiased on the Editor's and poster's machines becuase they are running Silk (or so I guess). Without Silk installed (or disabling Word in Silk) turning off text smoothing in Word completely disables smoothing (not different smoothing, completely off).

As for the speed difference between having Silk enable smoothing and Word enable smoothing, I suspect it is a difference in options. If you look at the "General" entry in Silk (the one that applies to all applications listed) you see that it does _not_ enable Quartz text metrics. I suspect that Word's own smoothing option does enable this mode, along with Word internal features to make sure that smoothed fonts still layout correctly o n the page.

So you are sacrificing layout accuracy for speed. Probably an acceptable tradeoff.

As a side note I usually disable Silk for applications I know handle their own text smoothing (IE, Office X, Mozilla, etc.). Call me paranoid but it seems best to make sure Silk doesn't interfere with applications capable of using Quartz smoothing on their own. At minimum it prevents confusion like this article about what the application is actually doing.



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