Friday, February 6, 2009

Font smoothing in Remote Desktop to Windows XP

After looking for quite some time for a solution, I just found this post the other day on Jason Young's blog at http://www.ytechie.com/, explaining how to enable font smoothing on XP Remote Desktop server.

Consolas font was looking very jaggedy when connecting through Remote Desktop to my XP development box (btw, as an alternative I can recommend Lucida Sans Typewriter ;-), although I've tried both Standard and ClearType font smoothing settings, they were completely ignored.

This registry fix will enable font smoothing through Remote Desktop (remember you need XP SP3!!!), and the good news that Consolas still looks great in Standard mode, you don't need to enable ClearType for the entire session, unless of course you like it better that way.

Select the three lines below yourself, save them into a .reg file and then open (run) the file on the XP "server" machine, or download and open from here. Reboot the XP machine when finished and set the font smoothing per your liking.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations]
"AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001

8 comments :

  1. Not the only one to hate unhinted, unsmoothed Consolas over RDP!

    Thanks. I'll see how it looks next time I reboot. It's really irritating how font smoothing is enabled on the PC *AND* in my RDP client and still ignored.

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  2. :-) the good news is that MS released a hotfix for Windows 2003 Server as well, haven't tried that yet...

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  3. Works great. I've been running my XP workstation as a virtual machine on VMware ESX.

    Using rdesktop to display the XP desktop resulted in horrible fonts, especially in Outlook 2007.

    The registry fix, along with this Microsoft KB for allowing 24bit TS connections got things looking good:

    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;278502&sd=tech

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  4. This doesn't work in all cicumstances. If the session is initiated remotely it actually uses a different registry setting.

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp]
    "AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001

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  5. Excellent thank you!

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  6. Beautiful (literally)! Thank you so much! My eyes feel a lot better now, after six months of suffering the jaggies.

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  7. Glad it helped. You should also try updating your RDP client - http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2010/05/remote-desktop-connection-70-client-for.html

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