Making Text Look Sharper on Your Webpage

There are a few little tricks that will help your text look a bit sharper on your webpages, especially at smaller sizes.

Resizing:
When resampling blocks of text, there is an option that you may not have noticed, that will help you achieve sharper results. This is particularly useful when you have scanned in blocks of text or line art.



When we go to resize the image, Bicubic resampling is the default option. This works best for most images.



Here is the result on our text.



Try it again, this time choose bilinear resampling



Notice how much sharper the text is?



The second trick is for small text and is tracking, or kerning. This means the spacing between letters. Here is a line of text with standard tracking.



In the tracking box, increase the amount to 20



See how much more legible the text is. Look at a road sign and you will notice that the tracking is set very wide. That is why you can read them from a distance.



Here is a line of text with the crisp anti-alising, kind of blurry.



Photoshop 7 ships with a new level called Sharp, notice the difference?



I hope these little tips will help you to produce webpages with sharper, easier to read text.