Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

egman,

I'm really surprised, you say this:

"I never knew a single person who actually preferred Cleartype"

I cannot look at any windows screen, without this "ClearType" set.    Whenever, I visit any of my collegues' desks, I can instantaneously recognize, if they don't set "clearType".    Being application support person, first thing, I do is to set the ClearType.  Some people immediately say, it's better and sharp and some others would say, don't see any difference.   May be my eyes are different and I simply cannot live without ClearType.   I can can clearly see the breaks in the letters (digital dots spread apart) unless clearType is set.

fyi.  ClearType setting was never a default (never enabled) in Windows XP.    Only from Windows 7

Well, pictures posted in this forum are resized when they are too wide so unless you got the size right before posting them, people won't be able to see what you mean (max width is around 450 px if I remember right).

But, no, cleartype has never been enabled by default on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 on my laptops.

Cleartype has always made my fonts look fuzzy without any doubt, not the other way around, and I have always had an usual laptop screen with a pixel density of around 100 PPI.

Correct, Cleartype was NOT the default in Windows XP.

If I recall correctly, it wasn't "unsmoothed" either, but - indeed - "standard font smoothing".

I am in Linux right now, so I don't see the settings dialogue of Windows XP.

But it is something like this:

Open the display properties dialogue, go to "effects" (if that is the right term), you will find a setting with a check mark; if you remove the check mark, unsmoothed rendering will be the result.

If you leave the check mark, the stock setting is "standard font smoothing" (or whatever it is called precisely), you may, however, change this to "Cleartype" - which is not the default in (at least) XP (don't know about Vista, 7 etc.).

I am aware (from hearing about it on the Internet and also in this thread, for sure) that there are users who like or want Cleartype.

Our eyes must be different, though, because I absolutely can't stand it (whatever settings in the tuner) - seeing coloured  subpixels is just unbearable to me. In Linux, it is even worse for me: I cannot stand subpixel rendering and I cannot stand grayscale there - so I am forced to use jaggy unsmoothed rendering.

Of course, one can use hardware based rendering in Firefox (for instance in Windows 7), but whether I use it with Cleartype or with standard font smoothing, any directwrite rendering is too blurry for me.

Partly, all this may be a matter of preference and taste, but for some it is more than that:

a matter of doing harm to one's eyes and health or not.

-egman-

Something people might not have spoken about here is the way web designers, and app developers I guess, now want to use non web-safe fonts because it supposedly looks nicer.

Web-safe fonts can be displayed well without anti-aliasing but other fonts doesn't necessarily look good without anti-aliasing and so non web-safe fonts and anti-aliasing often go together (but not necessarily well).

More and more websites are forcing anti-aliasing by default in browsers so even Chrome now displays some websites with anti-aliasing even if you switched it off unless you have an extension to change the font family that is used.

So, to me, it looks like some designers want their applications and websites to look more beautiful by using non web-safe fonts and anti-aliasing when it looks like garbage on ordinary, around 100 PPI screens like mine and I find that quite ironic.

And I wonder if they have a different eyesight with which they can't see what it does on many screens or whether they are so narrow-minded about using different fonts that they don't care. The Google Web fonts with anti-aliasing just don't look good to read on my screen and they are displayed with forced anti-aliasing in Chrome. I don't care if they are used in titles to make them look nicer but it's just not fine with me to read long texts using these fonts. It comes from Google so I'm afraid we're not of the woods yet, quite the contrary in fact. The practice of forcing anti-aliasing on users, like in Windows, seems to be growing.

One of the most interesting articles I've read about this topic is this one: "The price of nice looks: anti-aliased fonts hurt eyes and damage eyesight" http://annystudio.com/misc/anti-aliased-fonts-hurt/