idbit - 5:08 pm on Feb 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

In case somebody didn't already mention this, IE8 is going to give you different results than IE7 and FF3. IE8 adds their own aliasing to your image text. It's really more of a blur according to some. Something tells me that this aliasing will be the future for IE. I'd be interested to know what FF4 is doing.

I spent time playing with this awhile back, trying text with each type of aliasing, viewing in each browser. All things considered, I settled on just leaving the text unaliased. Verdana font looks fine to me with no aliasing. To me, these fonts appear plenty sharp on my images at 100% zoom:

Verdana, Regular, 14pt, AA:None.
Verdana, Bold, 16pt, AA:None.
Saved as GIF.

In IE7 and FF3 at 100%, these look quite sharp and unjaggy. In IE8, the aliasing is applied. If I switch back and forth among browsers, I actually prefer the unaliased versions. Once you apply the zoom tool, they all look about the same - aliased. If you want, I can pm you a link where you can view these images.