Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

That's not a solution but a tedious workaround to a problem that exists solely because MS switched Windows to grey-scale anti-aliasing. Much easier to just use nonwindows progs.

Much confusion in this thread...

The problem does *not* arise from switching to grayscale anti-aliasing, but from switching to hardware rendering (directwrite) and from not giving us an option to disable it.

In fact, I love grayscale font smoothing, always liked it.

And I don't remember people complaing about blurry fonts in the olden times when there was just the choice between a) "unsmoothed" font rendering and b) the socalled "standard font smoothing" (=grayscale).

We had these options (if I recall correctly) since Windows 95 (with plus pack), and of course in Windows 2000 and XP. And fortunately, this traditional way of font smoothing can still be used instead of headache-inducing Cleartype until today in Windows 7 and 8.

Nothing beats crispness in grayscale smoothing in all kinds of Windows (as compared to Linux which only comes close but not enough for me to enjoy reading long texts - all fontconfig settings tried, nothing helps to get the same degree of sharpness). Standard font smoothing (grayscale) is still the best for my eyes, while Cleartype is completely useless (for me) giving me hurting eyes and headaches.

I understand that some (many?) people in this very long thread miss RGB font rendering (coloured Cleartype subpixel rendering). That's okay, if you like it that way.

Nevertheless, I still claim that this is not the root of the Windows 8 font rendering issue.

As I said, it is the switch to hardware rendering and the lack of an option to disable it or to even use coloured rendering.

If there were such an option, people would be free to use any of those 3 (or 4) options:

• unsmoothed
• grayscale
• Cleartype
• directwrite

What is so hard to offer these various options?

-egman-

Also having font rendering problem on Windows 8.1, I found MacType as a Google Code Project : https://code.google.com/p/mactype/

And I'm really satisfied of the rendering after installation.

I don't have any screenshot, and I know it's not a long term solution but I really recommend this little software.

Newer versions of Visual Studio have trouble with IE 8.

Isn't (a developer's) life funny...

PS: no offense, just grinning how many version-interop-permutation-possibilities sum up and make our jobs harder, but keep the brain up and running while looking for solutions ;-)

Newer versions of Visual Studio have trouble with IE 8.

Due to non-resolution, I am stuck on the following components:

...

Visual Studio 2010

For me, system colors must be inverted (black backgrounds) and all fonts must be bi-level rendered. A font that requires ClearType (such as Consolas or Segoe) must be banished from the system.

Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 work well (for me, but I use white background, not sure if that makes a relevant difference to your setup) if you change all Consolas default font settings to e.g. Courier New. Then the anti aliasing is gone. As you already said, Consolas does not work well without anti aliasing, so it seems hard coded into VS to always use anti aliasing when displaying text with Consolas.