title: Disable Cleartype (text anti-aliasing) in IE9
body: <p>It's well documented (e.g. <a href="http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/598107/cleartype-is-always-used-even-when-disabled-in-ie-options-and-window-7" rel="noreferrer">here</a>) that IE9 ignores the OS-wide settings for font smoothing (aka anti-aliasing).  Even if font-smoothing and ClearType are disabled in Windows, IE still shows anti-aliased fonts, which some users struggle to read, especially at small font sizes. </p>
  
  <p>How can I disable all font anti-aliasing (ClearType or otherwise) in IE9?</p>
  
  <p><strong>More details:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Our company builds a web application which uses a lot of small fonts. With the release of IE9, some of our users have complained that IE9's default anti-aliasing makes our small fonts fuzzy or blurry. So we need to help our users who've installed IE9 and who want to turn off anti-aliasing. </p>
  
  <p>Also, personally, I have trouble reading small, anti-aliased fonts, so I'd like a solution for my own use, even for sites I don't control. </p>
  
  <p>In IE8 I could uncheck the "Always use ClearType for HTML" and then disable ClearType in the OS and IE8 would show all fonts aliased. But in IE9, this option is missing. </p>
  
  <p>After some research about the problem, here's what I've learned: the core issue is that IE relies on DirectWrite for text rendering and does not support any of the newer rendering options which would draw text without anti-aliasing and respect the user's OS-wide default choices. </p>
  
  <p>Making things worse, if you disable ClearType in the OS, in some cases IE will fall back to DirectWrite's default non-cleartype anti-aliasing which is even fuzzier than ClearType. </p>