You can turn Cleartype off, not that it matters to Reapers text rendering. It does use more performance. Small fonts are usually Tahoma for me. Try those. Not sure if Reaper will sacrifice performance for a sleeker look, since these days, larger fonts may come in to play with all the big screens people seem to be getting. White Tie, any other suggestions for fonts ?

... and here ... Clear Type is enabled.

i can confirm the exact same behavior. thought i messed up some windowssetting till now

Reading the text has definitely been a bit of an eyesore for me on the newer builds, darkstars screenshot shows this...2.58 had it right.

Well, I'm very confused because...

Here's another trial. Starting with v3a5 Default >> v3a5 Default 2.0 >> v2.58, smae theme referenced >> v2.58 Default. Looking at the expanded track numbers (or the letters t and h in the track labels), Clear Type does not seem to be used in the v3a5 snapshots. [nittiest_pick] PS Are the track numbers 1 pixel too high ? [/nittiest_pick]

I just tested and the same happens here too. I had to restart Reaper after making the ClearType change though.

I think the issue can be summarized as: if you use ClearType, Reaper now antialiases the font but doesn't use ClearType. This is because as part of a major drawing performance improvement/overhaul for 3.0, Reaper now renders almost everything to memory, and I believe ClearType is only supported by hardware device drivers. So Windows decides to antialias instead which it figures is the next best thing. (For anyone who says their ClearType setting doesn't affect the problem, you need to restart Reaper after changing the system ClearType setting.) In any case, as far as I can tell this only affects masochists who use ClearType. We'll probably just add something to disable antialiasing below a certain font size.

I thought I just explained why.

Test with the latest Reaper 3 version. Cleartype on Cleartype off I think Cleartype looks bad on small fonts anyway, on all apps, which is why I keep it off. Almost any antialiasing on small fonts looks bad IMO.