What causes the edges of these characters to appear fuzzy, especially when they are in bold or italic type with the beige background? Is it because of a poor font choice or maybe the combination of font color and background color?

Is this called dithering?

My Webpage

Maybe your own settings. Do you have font-smoothing on, ClearType? Assuming you are on Windows here.

I don't find your fonts fuzzy, but I do have a big problem with some thin fonts, MS Sans Serif is one. It seems to have to do with flat screens, because those fonts looked really nice and crisp on my CRT and now I have the same problem on my netbook and my big screen. It's highly irritating because many older programs use MS Sans Serif for menus and such. I read an explanation once, I have forgotten the details, but it had to do with that TFTs aren't so good at hinting as CRTs, so very thin lines can become squiggly. On the other hand I've asked people who say they don't have a problem with for example MS Sans Serif...

Pandy you are a genious! That was it, just the use of Cleartype. Microsoft did something right... The difference is remarkable... And all these years I was without cleartype without realizing what function it served....I see why Microsoft has it turned on as default in new operating systems.

Now, when we are editing an image for a website, do we want cleartype on or off?

I don't think ClearType applies to images. Try anti-aliasing instead.

Good. Now, if someone could solve my display problem with the squiggly thin fonts...

BTW, at least if you are on XP, MS has a tool that fixes some problems with ClearType. Maybe it works on newer OS too, don't know. It fixed a horrible problem I had that caused blotchy letters in some program interfaces. I never understood how it worked, but through support for another program that refused to install and threw a Java error I was informed there was a registry change concerning ClearType, a change that according to the support person only could be made manually. Well, duh. I didn't do anything, so I guess some program did. The PowerToy gizmo reset everything to the factory settings and my problem were gone. Still don't understand what ClearType settings have to do with Java errors.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleart...uner/step1.aspx

Maybe something superficially similar to this? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2006/08/31/730887.aspx Do programs use DXTransforms?

Don't ask me. I don't know what DXTransforms are and I don't want to. I just want my stuff to work.

I had been trying a bunch of programs for making graphs, pie charts and such and I suspect one of them messed with my settings. On the other hand I could have had the problem for a long time, because only two programs were affected and they were newly installed. One of them was Calibre e-book manager. The text wasn't readable and since it was new to me I thought it was a crappy program. By pure luck I got that installation error with the other program and after that was resolved Calibre was fine too.

DXTransforms are MSIE's filters and transitions. Maybe some desktop programs use the same funktionality.

Oh, no. It's perfectly normal programs, no effects.

I found a screen cap of the blotchy mess. As you can see the text in my email program in the background is perfectly fine.

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