InformationWeek

November 23, 1998

An Easy Read: Microsoft's ClearType

By Stuart J. Johnston

t his Comdex keynote last week, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates showed off a new software technology aimed at improving the readability of text on flat-panel computer displays.

That technology, which Microsoft calls "ClearType," is one of the recent developments to come out of Microsoft Research--the company unit chartered with working on "basic" research. Though those present probably couldn't see exactly how much this technology really improves the readability of text on-screen, largely due to the poor resolution of the video cameras and giant video display screens used in such arena-like presentations, I got a hands-on demonstration of it several days earlier.

It was remarkable.

If you have a device--either a laptop, subnotebook, or a handheld computer of some sort--try this little test. Open your text-processing program and pull up a document you want to read. Select all the text and set the type size to 8- or 9-point italic. Now see if you can read it.

I got to try this on the very latest Silicon Graphics flat-panel desktop display, with more than 1,000 pixels both vertically and horizontally, which had a resolution nearly as good as High Definition Television. Even on that screen, with my failing eyesight, it was virtually impossible to read "The Thirty-Nine Steps," a 1915 spy novel by John Buchan that was later made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

It got even worse as I looked at the same text on a middle-of-the-road laptop, a subnotebook, and finally, a handheld PC.

The problem, explained Microsoft researchers, is that at that point size the width of a line that comprises part of a letter is reduced to the width of a single pixel. If you bold-face the text to make it more readable, it just gets plugged up because that merely doubles the number of pixels. Readability is not noticeably improved. It might as well have been Greek, even wearing reading glasses.

This is all a function of what has been called "the jaggies"--at least since the advent of laser printers. On a screen, since a character is made up of several pixels, as you go from pixel to pixel, particularly on a diagonal, you get a stair-step effect; that is, characters appear to break because the form of the character crosses several pixel boundaries and those parts of each individual character do not display properly.

On laser printers, the main way to improve the resolution significantly was to buy a printer with higher resolution--600 dots per inch instead of 300 dpi, or 300 dpi instead of 110 dpi, for example.

The screen problem has been one of the main gating factors in the failure of the "electronic book"--a concept that has been tried several times in the past. At the heart of the problem is that making a screen with enough resolution so that text display begins to approximate the quality of text printed on paper is prohibitively expensive. Thus, to make an "E-book" that approaches the readability of paper has been unattainable.

ClearType may well turn out to be an important step toward turning this vision into reality.

The Microsoft researchers have developed a strictly software-based technology that lets them address the space within pixels on existing screen technologies--primarily flat-panel technologies. The ClearType text I looked at actually used 1.5 pixels for those narrow parts of a letter, thus greatly decreasing the "jaggy" effect.

If you compared it to the laser printer problem, it would be like being able to use only a portion of a dot and being able to place that portion right next to the adjacent dot. So far, Microsoft's efforts have focused on displaying text, but there may be applications in graphics as well. ClearType makes a 9-point italic for which the actual addressable pixel size is more like 1.5 pixels wide.

Using it, even in 9-point italic, Buchan's book was very readable, even on the low-resolution screen on the handheld PC. The best thing about it is it doesn't require users to change their existing hardware.

There are implications above all for the consumer market, since this would make the current screen-resolution problems on existing E-books much better. A flat-panel device that you can carry in your hands starts to approximate the readability of printed paper text. That would also help to hold down the cost of E-books, which is critical to finally jump-starting that market.

But beyond the consumer market, this technology holds out promise for notebook computers. One in three machines purchased by companies today is a laptop. And now there's this new class of Windows CE devices that exists in the subnotebook space--the so-called "Jupiter" devices. All of these things have flat-panel displays.

So, thinking creatively, say you had a Jupiter-class device, a subnotebook that weighs about a pound and a half. Say you've also signed up with one of the wireless carriers that Microsoft and Qualcomm have recruited to offer the digital communications service that will be provided by their joint venture--Wireless Knowledge. Say you've got that installed on your Jupiter device.

While you're asleep, not only has all your E-mail and scheduling information been downloaded to your machine, but so have the newspapers to which you subscribe. You get up, take a taxi to the airport, and instead of purchasing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal at the newsstand, you get on the plane with just your Jupiter. Instead of wrestling with the newspaper's oversized form factor ("Hey, buddy, can you put that down? I'm trying to watch the movie.") and getting newsprint on your hands, you get out your Jupiter and read. A dimly lit airline cabin isn't a problem since the screen is backlit or illuminated. And you can do all this without getting eye strain because the text will be much more readable.

That's what I'm thinking, anyway. Now, Microsoft's researchers are thinking that long-term, we will get to the point where 90% or more of what's committed to paper is in electronic form. But they are realistic about such visions, which have been frustrated before. The transition from our paper-bound world of today to one where you can carry every title in the Library of Congress in one hand will take 10 to 40 years, very possibly on the long side. But as the Chinese proverb says: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

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