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Font rasterization is the process of anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read to the eye. This involves making pixels appear translucent around the edge of the letter, for example grey pixels around a black-on-white letter. This can also be applied to images.
Types of rasterization
Aliasing and ClearType anti-aliasing. Depending on the operating system, methods of rasterization will be different. On most Windows computers, a standard method of anti-aliasing is used that adds relatively weak rasterization to TrueType fonts. With the addition of Windows XP, a new type of rasterization, ClearType, was introduced. This adds dark red and blue pixels to the edges of black-on-white text. This results in smoother anti-aliasing on LCD screens.
In Mac OS X, there are no clear defined types of anti-aliasing. However, on closer examination of text, it is clear that a stronger version of standard rasterization is used. In System Preferences there is an option to change to a type of anti-aliasing similar to the ClearType found on Windows XP machines optimized for LCD displays.
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