Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

Jacob,

About a year ago I had a similar discussion with a guy who tried to analyze and examine everything like you do. The page with that thread took something like 5 minutes to load - that's how much material that guy provided. The discussion was about fonts in Internet Explorer 9 (if my memory serves me well) looking like puke, and about users' inability to turn the font smoothing off.

I can see the problem not only has not been fixed, it only has gotten worse. To me it looks like still the same problem - fonts looking blurry and unreadable.

The way I see it, Microsoft should throw the whole thing out the window and start over. Buy the license for font smoothing algorithms from Apple, if they can't figure it out themselves.

Or provide the ability to turn if off completely, as I've been requesting over and over and over again.

Wes

Wes,

I know about the issue of which you speak. Namely, that in recent versions of Internet Explorer (even before Windows 8), Microsoft decided to always force ClearType to be on, despite the OS's setting to disable ClearType. I still disagree with their decision to have done that.

But the issue in this thread is separate; it is about how ClearType is applied within the Windows 8 Start Screen, Windows 8 Modern Apps, Office 2013, and the most recent versions of Internet Explorer.

It is a separate issue. And I do agree with your statement that the font rendering problems have indeed gotten worse, in a sense, because now we have an additional issue affecting more than just Internet Explorer.

The only way forward is for Microsoft to change. And, while I do agree it would be neat to have the option to disable ClearType across the board, I believe their higher priority should be to fix the grayscale ClearType antialiasing that they have "forced" upon us with the affected OS's and applications.

I really hope Microsoft cares. It reminds me of a video I once saw, where a Microsoft head described how swiping left and right on the Start Screen would make sure that, if the animated groups of content were going to stop very nearly lined up with the word "Start", the OS would make sure that it did line up exactly. We need that sort of "care" to be involved with implementing the solution that I proposed.

Microsoft, please fix this.

Thanks,

Jacob Klein

Heck, they don't need to fix it. They can leave it on by default for all I care, just give us an option to disable it. Would it really be hard? They already have the option to enable/disable "Smooth edges of screen fonts", just add another option under the Performance Options for us to disable it.

FIXED - My solution was to right click and go to the properties of individual affected apps and tick "disable scaling on higher resolution displays" or something similar. Hope this works for you guys as a temporary fix.

IT WORKS!

Fonts are still not perfect (on win7 they are much crispier), but much better than before!

I had that problem on a surface PRO both with the "onboard" display and the external one:

That worked perfectly! Thanks!

Just to be more precise (for future readers)

1 - Open the folder containing the program

2 - Right click  on the executable file

3 - Click Compatibility tab

4a - For single user: check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"

4b - For all the users: Click on "Change settings for all users (requires Admin), check the "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"

I had a big problem reading text (in spotify and PSPAD) on a ~20 inches 1680 x 1050 monitor.

That trick fixed the issue.

Again, Thank you!

The main problem I have on Windows 8.1 is with IE11 (and Office 2013).

Both are Microsoft applications.

There is no compatibility tab for these. 

However, there may yet be hope:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-to-Fix-Blurry-Text-Bug-in-Windows-8-1-RTM-Rumor-373205.shtml

A rumour is better than nothing.