But they aren't cheap. It makes characters easier to read, paradoxically, by making them less sharp. To understand the concept, look closely at a magnified capital letter X . On your screen, the diagonal lines look like intersecting flights of stairs, rather than straight lines. Anti-aliasing inserts extra pixels, in varying shades of gray, along the stairstep edges.
Lines look like lines and curves look like curves.
That's good, because our brains try to recognize silhouettes of whole words rather than proceeding letter by letter. Smooth type makes that process easier, so reading is faster. Be aware, though, that all of them can marginally slow your system's performance. Microsoft has a Windows 95 font-smoother utility, which can be downloaded for free from the typography portion of its Web site . It will require you to set your PC to 16-bit color mode.