Readers Respond: Is Anti-Aliasing or Font Smoothing Still Important?

In 1996, I was working in a Web team, and the issue of smoothing our fonts and anti-aliasing our images came up. The debate was so heated that we had a full team meeting just to discuss the pros and cons of doing this to our text and GIF files.

But these days, with screen resolutions getting so high, the likelihood of "jaggies" appearing on your Web page is fairly low. So is font smoothing or anti-aliasing still important? When I put fonts in graphics (and I don't do this very often now), I always use the "Crisp" setting in Photoshop, so that the text is legible. But beyond that I don't worry about it.

TOTALLY

Yes. AA is critical. We're not longer living in a world where we are limited by the number of pixels on the screen.

—Guest Zomg

Yes

Yes, it's important. I love anti-aliasing. It makes everything better.

—Guest whyhellotharr

absolutely

As a graphic design student we would not even consider aliased text; we worked exclusively in vectors.

—David05

Its relevant if you use Publisher 2007

Its relevant if you use Microsoft Publisher 2007. I put my heart and soul for 20 hours building a website only to find that all my large type shows jagged edges in Firefox and Safari. Apparently Publisher converts all text to images in parallel files for Firefox and other non-Internet explorer browsers. The result is that my web page looks awful in everything but Internet explorer (thanks Microsoft). Anyway, I've been looking for CSS code that will anti-alias those images. No luck yet.

—sean7phil

Anti-aliasing still important

I think that it really depends on the font and the design now. I still use anti-aliasing but not as much as I used to. A lot of the fonts that I use now seem to look good just the way they are. However, there are certain circumstances where you really want that smooth soft look.

—hafnerdesigns

Justamere

Yes is important to me . I combine art and text in many cases and the overprint is very effective with some art.

—Guest Justamere