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. AnonymousMay 16, 2009 at 9:00 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dan DragutMay 17, 2009 at 1:31 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownSeptember 16, 2009 at 8:39 PM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dan DragutSeptember 17, 2009 at 11:43 AM

    Nice, thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  5. pdf23dsJuly 26, 2010 at 2:58 AM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousSeptember 10, 2010 at 4:05 AM

    Excellent thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousNovember 2, 2011 at 3:33 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  8. Dan DragutNovember 2, 2011 at 4:54 PM

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

    ReplyDelete