Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

Guys, this behavior is somewhat expected, because Microsoft has moved away from using colorized sub-pixel-antialiasing, to using standard antialiasing instead.

Please read up on it here:

http://bjango.com/articles/subpixeltext/

Basically, Microsoft's UI changes have led to much more animated text, and the hardware changes in the PC world have led to an increase in tablets whose orientation can be rotated. Because text needs to be animated without flickering, and because text quality needs to be good regardless of which way you rotate the display, Microsoft has made the decision to move away from sub-pixel-antialiasing.

Microsoft's move is noticeable to most people, in the places they've applied the new behavior:

• Windows 8 Modern UI Start Screen and Apps
• Office 2013
• The latest versions of Internet Explorer

I spend most of my day using an LCD monitor in the Desktop mode (not in Modern UI), in Firefox (not Internet Explorer), so I don't often see this behavior. But, I agree that, for the times that I do see this behavior, it's very annoying, because it makes the fonts appear much less crisp to me.

It would be nice if the user could choose whether to allow sub-pixel-antialiasing or not, but Microsoft has not provided us that option as of yet. It's possible they never will.

I just wanted to get this information out there, so people stop "guessing at the problem", and instead realize the facts behind the behavior and the current situation.

Good luck,

Jacob Klein

Hi Jacob, thanks for your thoughts and link.

However, Microsoft had better implement rgb positioning because displays aren't reaching resolutions where this issue becomes invisible any time soon. Office 2013 font rendering still looks quite noticeably worse on my 1920x1080 15 inch laptop screen, and it has roughly 150 ppi. And I spend most of my day working on a 24 inch 1080p or 1200p display. Even a 4k 24 inch monitor with a resolution of 3840x2160 will still only have a PPI of around 180 or so. Given that I can see a significant difference in font rendering with my 15 inch 1080p laptop, I expect I could still see a difference with a 4k 24 inch monitor as well. And why would I spend money replacing some great 1080p monitors when the only issue is a font rendering choice? When 8k monitors dip below $300 this will be a non-issue, but we're a very long way from that happening.

Yeah, has Microsoft forgotten that most people still need to do things other than Internet and games on their computers? I do as much Internet as anyone, but I also actually need to write and read things It is infuriating!

Buy the way, luckily I didn't buy Office 2013 per se. I bought Office 2010 knowing that with this purchase I would be able to "upgrade" to 2013 for free when it came out. Lucky I got in when I did and have Office 2010 to fall back on.

But I am really disappointed, and angry, because I was looking forward to using many of the great new features of 2013. But for now, I can't because of the stupid font problem. And I definitely won't recommend it to anyone else either.

I totally agree with you!

I found a solution that seems to be working at least for me. When I bought my new computer with Windows 8 in March it had a HDMI port to which I connected a HDMI cable to my monitor. I had used a DVI cable with my previous Windows 7 computer as it had no HDMI port. My old computer had crashed but I am using the same monitor. I thought HDMI was more advanced than DVI.

Today I tried hooking up my monitor with my old DVI cable and the fonts are now crystal clear. I am not an expert on this but perhaps HDMI is geared more toward videos and not text.