Subject is a little hard to understand given that it refers to
CreateFont() in the Win32 API, so I'll explain the situation:
With the introduction of Windows 7 (possibly Vista), ClearType and font smoothing ("anti-aliasing") have become more or less a requirement for general use. You can turn them off system-wide, but a lot of web fonts (yes that is the term) render horribly without hinting support enabled. Thus for most systems, ClearType + font smoothing must remain enabled system-wide.
How this relates to mIRC:
I have several TTF fonts that do not have hinting in them (nor can it easily be added). In the above scenario, in mIRC, these fonts look awful -- "unfocused", blurry, and often with red tinges around their edges (especially noticeable on black backgrounds). No joke: I went to bed at 4am this morning with a massive headache because of how badly my eyes were reacting to this situation.
It is absolutely 100% possible for an individual application, when using CreateFont(), to tell Windows "what" it wants: it's through the fdwQuality struct variable, specifically ANTIALIASED_QUALITY, CLEARTYPE_QUALITY and NONANTIALIASED_QUALITY values. DEFAULT_QUALITY should be the default setting.
Proof that these work is in the PuTTY application, which lets you set the "font quality" no matter if the font has hinting or not:
Thus, I'd like to request this feature be added to mIRC under View -> Font... (via radio buttons, like PuTTY).
This shouldn't be too bad to add (most of the work would in the GUI area), and would really make me a happy camper being able to use monospace terminal-focused TTFs that lack hinting. I can provide a great font (from the X11 ucs-fonts package, but painstakingly made into a TTF) for testing if need be.
I'd also be more than happy to help beta test this feature.
This subject, but for /drawtext,
came up a few years ago. I do not want "all the font features", I simply want the above 4 selections added via radio buttons.
