I viewed all three applications simultaneously on both a Windows machine and a Mac machine in different positions, there was no difference when moving the applications to different window positions. I believe that there is something different when creating an AIR file on certain machines as opposed to others. The question then is, what is significant about the environment of the computer/os of the machine that produced the middle image? When I described the text as “crap”, I was talking more about the text on the buttons and the italic text, this is the area of the most significant readability issues. My hypothesis was that creating an AIR file on three different machines, and then running those AIR files on a single machine would show that it was in fact the machine that produced the AIR file that somehow caused the display differences. It does not matter which machine you run the three files on, you always get the same results. Something about the Windows XP Pro machine produced different fonts than the AIR files created on the other two machines. It is as if the AIR file is being “injected” with some quality by the Windows XP Pro machine that is not happening with the other two machines.

My other theory is that there is some element of the Flex Properties that is different from machine to machine, but I just don’t know what it is. My other thought was that some how the application is scaling the fonts slightly, causing the effect on the fonts. I say this because we just checked out the code with the .flexProperties file already attached, rather than create a new Flex project and just adding the class files. I will test this soon.

Remember that I viewed all three applications on both Windows and Mac at the same time, meaning I had all three applications running at the same time on each test machine side-by-side. There should be no difference in the fonts displayed for the applications. If you are saying that having “ClearType” enabled on the machine that creates the AIR runtime package, then this is still whacked. It would mean that you always have to create the runtime on a Windows machine to produce a higher quality AIR runtime application. This seems to be counter-intuitive to the purpose of AIR, which is to have the same application run on multiple operating systems without any difference in the application. I can’t imagine always having to do my work on my Mac, then run over to my Windows machine and compile my runtime to achieve optimum results. Of course I would have to be sure I have at least one machine that produces the clear fonts because one version was created on another Windows machine and still the fonts are different.

For the record I don’t see any significant difference in the screen shots, apart from a missing tab on the Windows XP, and the tab text is slightly thicker on the middle example (actually prefer the others, the middle one looks like it’s got glow on). I certainly wouldn’t descibe any as “crap”. Maybe a screenshot dosn’t show the problem correctly, as it is a bitmap being interpreted by our graphic cards, not a font. You might consider posting a small test app for people to try and post feedback?

Display Properties -> Appearance tab -> Effects -> “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:”.

I have mine deselected, but one machine may have it set to “Standard” or “ClearType”, or whatever.

Peter