Blurry Text in Windows 8

Anonymous
2012-10-27T01:27:12+00:00

I did a clean install of Windows 8 RTM when it became available.

The blurry font rendering that plagued the Preview versions has remained.

It is particularly bad in IE10 and Office 2013.

No amount of adjustment with Clear Type tuner helps much.

I have tried all the fixes recommended like ticking "use Software rendering instead of GPU rendering" in IE10 and in Options in Office 2013.

It makes absolutely no difference.

I installed Windows 8 on completely different hardware to check if it was a graphics card issue. The poor font rendering was still there.

I am currently dual booting Windows 7 and 8 on the same PC. Fonts in Windows 7 remain perfectly clear. In windows 8 they are so bad, the OS is basically unusable.

How do I get readable fonts in Windows 8?

Hardware: ASUS P8Z77-V PRO, Intel Core i7 3770K, ASUS Radeon HD7770 graphics, Samsung Syncmaster 2443BW 24 inch monitor.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
2014-10-02T13:21:40+00:00

In Chrome 37.x go to chrome://flags and disable DirectWrite. That's the first thing i did with this update.

Torsten

Was this answer helpful?

6 people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

65 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-01-30T11:00:19+00:00

    The cause for Office, Modern UI and IE10 to look so bad is that they use a new graphics rendering API offered in Windows 8 (and with updates on Windows 7, too). 

    The new font rendering engine offered by this new API simply doesn't have Clear Type implemented. So unless Microsoft patches this new API to support Clear Type, no program using this API will ever be able to do so.

    The reason why Firefox (and Chrome, to an extend) are able to use Clear Type is because they still rely on the old Windows font-rendering API.

    This is a bad decision by Microsoft, but their reasoning behind that (from what i think) is also quite clear: It is based on the assumption that their future will be in the tablet market. Since ClearType only works in one direction (horizontally, that is), it is totally useless if you rotate the tablet. The other thing is animation: if you animate a Clear Type anti-aliased font, its boundaries will start to flicker. And since Modern UI is a lot about animations and transitions, this would offer a bad experience.

    Last thing is the much higher ppi (pixels per inch) offered by tablet screens (>200ppi) in respect to computer monitors (mostly <=120ppi), where grayscale-anti aliasing is totally sufficient for crisp fonts.

    And the worst thing: the Surface has a display with only 148ppi! So fonts look crappy on their reference design tablet.

    The bad thing is: no one can help you with the font rendering problem. You're on your own, as a consumer. For me that meant to downgrade back to Office 2010, ignoring Modern UI and all appscompletely and ditching IE 10 (but hey, that's a no-brainer, isn't it?).

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-29T11:22:09+00:00

    Thanks, but as I mentioned in the previous post, that doesn't work. Text still looks bad.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-27T19:41:38+00:00

    Go to File, Word options (options), Advanced, scroll half way down and check disable hardware acceleration. I had to this with my nvidia card but another machine was fine. Office now uses video card acceleration and some drivers probably have issues.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-25T11:32:49+00:00

    Same problems here with ATI... very annoying in Office 2013. Disabling aforementioned options doesn't work (Catalyst/Office advanced).

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments