Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

That was just an answer to my own post as an illustration of the subjectivity behind the choices of technology. It wasn't meant to be earth-shattering. :-)

Microsoft admitted that American engineers at Microsoft never understood, before Windows 8, that basic customers could find useful to use several languages in the UI so the option was only given in the Ultimate versions. They just needed English to work at Microsoft and so, that was it for them. At some point, they saw the light, and understood, for example, that there are also many people speaking Spanish in the USA and, sometimes, the parents speak Spanish and the children want to use English, so it was changed in the basic version of Windows 8. I myself would have had to get Windows 7 Ultimate to use the handwrittern recognition in several languages so I upgraded to Windows 8 instead. That's the kind of subjectivity with which they work at Microsoft it seems, unless it has changed...

I also posted about new screens further below and it's the only solution I see for the moment although I wish us to have Microsoft take a closer look at this as well...

The problem we are discussing here is once again, the lack of any adjustment options that makes the new directdraw/grayscale rasterizer a very bad player, plus the fact that you cannot turn it off or select an alternative. I most definitely would NOT swap it for non-antialiased text, but that's me. In my case I'd like to be able to use the good old cleartype rasterizer, especially in Office and IE, because on my monitor it looks much better than all the rest. (until I get my 4D 16384 x 9216 x 4G colors monitor that is...)

I do not want to be forced to a hi dpi display on my next laptop just to properly display anti aliased fonts, if my expectation gets true that those hi res displays will consume much more energy which lowers the time I can work unplugged with my laptop.

So just another aspect, relevant to some people like me, who can live with jagged text most of the time ;-)

To me it all comes down to: please give us an option in Windows to set anti aliasing to none, gray scaled or cleartype (the latter configurable with the cleartype tuner).

I guess the anti aliasing comes into play if applications use DirectWrite and not GDI. Not sure about GDI+.

So how about a shim option to control DirectWrite flags which gets used when DirectWrite is used by an application to render text?

Shimming explained: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/dd837644(v=ws.10).aspx

Maybe I overlook some technical details, but those shims can be applied per executable.

Not sure if a shim can be adjusted for running executables, which would help to adjust text rendering in e.g. browsers where you might want different settings depending on the page or content you view.

--

SvenC

Hum... My picture was a screenshot of my 100 PPI screen and the text on the right contained only black pixels unless you zoom in with a program which adds anti-aliasing. I checked by zooming in with a program which doesn't add anti-aliasing when zooming. Browsers often use anti-aliasing when zooming on pictures, however. That wasn't really to have an accurate comparison with the text on the left, it was just to show that text in my browser just uses black pixels because I switched off anti-aliasing and that's the rendering I would like to have all the time. I appreciated you trying it for us but I'm just not satisfied with anti-aliased text and a change of the gamma value.

For the rest, I, myself, posted here about web-safe fonts. Some developers and web designers want to use non web-safe and more beautiful fonts and add anti-aliasing but it just doesn't work well for different people using low PPI screens. It will work better, I guess, on higher PPI screens (I really mean PPI, and not DPI, pixels per inch).

Thanks for your answers, anyway.

I don't mean to be disrespectful but this might be the least helpful post so far, although that is mostly due to this thread having been bludgeoned down to the horse's skeletal remains.

Is there anything fresh to add to the discussion?

"Electronically displayed type attempts to imitate printed type—it has no choice in this matter. But while our entire typographic tradition (and calligraphic tradition before that) is based on black letters on a white background, electronic devices always display black by also using gray or color. It's a technique called font smoothing. Crisply defined black characters do not exist in this electronic world. All text is intentionally made slightly blurry (see**Figure 2**) to smooth out what would otherwise be jagged-edged characters, where individual pixels are distractingly visible."

"Electronically displayed type is normally rendered using shades of gray (top, in 14-point) to make its component pixels less visible. The type looks less jagged, but it's also blurry. "

http://www.adobepress.com/articles/article.asp?p=1747367&seqNum=2

It seems that "something" in particular decide people to prefer blurred edges to jagged edges or the opposite as the author of this text says that individual black pixels are distracting whereas I find myself that, on the contrary, shades of gray or colors added to characters are more distracting.

In an ideal user interface, everybody should be able to choose what they prefer though, in my opinion, without the creator of this interface, Microsoft here, choosing themself what they prefer.

I guess it might be kind of resolved when higher PPI screens are available on all devices though. I don't have the same problem with anti-aliasing on screens having around 200 PPI (my computer screen has around 100 PPI).

First let's not detract the reader by comparing cherries with watermelons. The image you posted compares two widely different resolutions, and NOT two different technologies. As far as I can see by zooming properly in, both renderings are antialiased. 

Many people will aggressively prefer non-antialiased text in low dpi monitors, ignoring that they are in fact viewing specially designed, high quality and carefully hinted fonts for non-antialiased rendering (like Arial)  - or the fact that others have to work with italics, script fonts, various sizes, colors etc,. Check out this image:

I find the non anti-aliased text unreadable and on my monitor the cleartype (bottom) part is the best, with the grayscale anti-aliased middle coming second. I do realize that some might find the grayscale text better than the others etc. and I'm ok with all that.

The problem we are discussing here is once again, the lack of any adjustment options that makes the new directdraw/grayscale rasterizer a very bad player, plus the fact that you cannot turn it off or select an alternative. I most definitely would NOT swap it for non-antialiased text, but that's me. In my case I'd like to be able to use the good old cleartype rasterizer, especially in Office and IE, because on my monitor it looks much better than all the rest. (until I get my 4D 16384 x 9216 x 4G colors monitor that is...)