Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

I checked it with the URL you give and, on my 100 PPI screen, all of your anti-aliased texts look bad. The only one that looks good is the text below the graph on the right which doesn't appear as anti-aliased on my screen. I'm not sure about what some people don't like about this latter text, whether it's purely an esthetic thing or not because they don't like the so-called jagged effect which I don't mind at all, but it's way more comfortable to read than all the other samples. So I wish I could get this type of text in Windows whenever I wish.

Full ack.

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SvenC

I have been using Windows on a desktop PC for many years.

 

I don't remember the XP install I did, but when I installed Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 ClearType was enabled by default.

 

Irrespective of arguments about ClearType vs DirectWrite, the disturbing fact is Microsoft don't care, and that apathy is an absolute disgrace.  It reflects very badly on Steve Ballmer.

 

I hope the new CEO, whoever that may be, has the intelligence and initiative to do something about it.

Full ack on the disturbing "don't care" part when it comes to give us an option to turn any anti aliasing off.

Off topic: But I am not sure if it really reflects Steve Ballmers thinking. My guess would be that Sinofsky and some "semi-technician-software-ui-designers" were driven to make things "easier" and more "beautiful". And that wish is and was *user* driven. So somehow we (the "anti-alias-not-wanters") are the victims of people who think Windows should be easier, which means less options in their eyes. So there is another Steve to blame: Jobs. He made people believe that his MacOS is so much easier to use. Microsoft had to react to that and they overreacted by thinking that they can merge their OSes for all form factors (PC/laptop, tablet, phone, what next? watch, car, fridge...) into one Windows with one UI, the new One Microsoft. Might turn out that different things need different UIs and different persons need different options ;-)

Let's see what Windows 9 brings back :-)

Or even 8.1 Update 1?

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SvenC

There is no way the text on the far right will look like what you say because: 

1. it's not a picture, it's some actual text ;
2. I use Chrome without anti-aliasing and ClearType is switched off on my computer.

The text on the far right is rendered just fine in my Chrome browser but the samples on your picture don't look fine to me according to my standards.

We've had many people coming here not understanding what we're talking about and why this thread was created in the first place but it's just that: some of us don't appreciate anti-aliasing and ClearType and would like to have the ability to switch them off across all Windows whenever they want so that text doesn't look like it does on your picture at all, whatever the gamma setting. Your gamma settings don't remove the "fuzzy" effect, it just appears a bit differently with different gamma values.

I'm posting a screenshot here and if you look at it with zoom at 100% in your browser, you might understand what I mean. If you don't like the rendering on the right, I and others really do like it and someone created this thread because of that.

(By the way, if a picture is wider than a certain size, which I don't remember exactly, it's resized when posted in this forum so that's why I posted a narrow picture below).

Assuming that you looked at the page using a Windows machine, and depending on your settings, the pictures might have been scaled. Try viewing them at a 1:1 scale. When pictures are scaled, the problem is not the renderer but the dpi scaling mentioned in other posts. If one looks at the page with a display set at 96dpi, regardless of the actual value, with the clear type setting to on, and a zoom at 100% then the text (rendered on the fly) on the far right should look like ClearType(gamma=1) if viewed with Chrome, or Grayscale(gamma=1) if viewed in IE10+. Unless your display has a strange or non rgb configuration, which would obviously alter the experience particularly regarding ClearType, the images at γ = 1, and the rendered text should not be very different. I am not aware of any graphics cards that would affect rendered text, but it's also a possibility.

I checked it with the URL you give and, on my 100 PPI screen, all of your anti-aliased texts look bad. The only one that looks good is the text below the graph on the right which doesn't appear as anti-aliased on my screen. I'm not sure about what some people don't like about this latter text, whether it's purely an esthetic thing or not because they don't like the so-called jagged effect which I don't mind at all, but it's way more comfortable to read than all the other samples. So I wish I could get this type of text in Windows whenever I wish.