If your graphics card has one of those gimmicky magnifying glass modes you can see it more clearly (sorry, I should have blown-up a section to make it easier to see). On OS X, you can do a realtime “zoom” by hitting some combination of four keys, cant remember which, sorry.

Or … find a really sharp LCD monitor: what you think “seems easier to read” will appear noticeably harder to read once the mointor is sharp enough (and/or your eyesight is good enough).

The downside is that it LOOKS MORE PRETTY – which is the main reason that people like Apple try to force you to use it. When you have a cheap LCD monitor, you lose the benefit of sharp text anyway, and it works OK. When you have a decent monitor (pretty cheap these days), you WOULD have sharp text if the software were rendering correctly.

A prime example of the problem is the letter i : because it’s thin, this “improved” rendering from Apple will often render the “i” as “light grey” when all the other text is “black” – because they’re attempting to make the letter average-out to what it would look like on a higher-resolution monitor. Nice idea, but the effect is like reading a very very very cheaply-printed book, one where the letters all have different ink amounts. Nasty.