Back a decade+ ago, onscreen fonts being “smooth” (aka anti-aliasing) was a big conversation – and concern. Windows did not have a good story on its display technology and PowerPoint relied on Windows for content rendering. In 2016, Microsoft had recently updated Windows the display engine, and PowerPoint was finally able to confidently display text anti-aliased (eg. “smooth”). Happily, this is not a conversation much today, as smooth font rendering and display from PowerPoint is taken for granted.
This post is just a good reminder that the PowerPoint team continues to improve its software, and general knowledge of what anti-aliased display rendering is (here’s a thought, do design schools even address this issue today…?).
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Picking a font style is important. Should it be a “safe” font, a professional font, a bold font, etc.? Any font style needs to display well and anti-aliasing is a big part of that. So, what is anti-aliasing?
The simple description of anti-aliasing is that it makes fonts display with smooth curves and angles, not jagged, low res looking edges. So if “anti-aliased ” is smooth, the opposite – hard edged fonts would make sense to be called “aliased.” However, the better term is “bit-mapped.”
Here’s a visual showing Aliased and Anti-Aliased Text:
Aliased (Jagged, Hard Edges):
Anti-Aliased (Smooth Edges):
The good news is PowerPoint applies anti-aliasing to text (which has not always been the case). But it is applied when in slide show. Objects and text may appear to have jagged edges (aliased) when editing. Anti-aliasing is also applied when printing, but through a different ‘engine’ than when presented. So, when running as a slideshow, everything is smooth, when printing, everything is (almost always smooth), when editing, it may not look as smooth.
In addition, Microsoft Windows OS has its own term and feature for anti-aliasing called ClearType. ClearType is basically Microsoft’s technology for doing anti-aliasing and making fonts have nice smooth curves and angles. ClearType is currently used by web browsers (all web browsers) and the operating system dialogs. But not Microsoft Office at this time.
On PowerPoint, when using the PowerPoint web app it is viewed through a browser for editing and slideshow. So, all text is anti-aliased in both views because the Microsoft ClearType works with all major web browsers.
So, should you be worried about anti-aliasing or smooth fonts with PowerPoint? Yes, it is a concern, but starting with Windows 10 and PowerPoint 2007 all fonts display anti-aliased with presented as a slideshow – and I can attest to being happy with text that is projected 20′ tall is HD, is smooth, and overall display very well (with the caveat that there is room for it to be better!).
-Troy @ TLC
This is from our Look Back series, rediscovering previous blog posts with relevant PowerPoint tips, tricks and examples. The original post from May 13th, 2016 can be viewed here.