why the fonts in word 2013 are blurry?

Thank you so much!! You have no idea how long I've been annoyed by the blurred view.

I don't see the blur in your screen caps, but that doesn't matter, you do.

Here is my whole collection of "Blurry" tips. Granted, some do not directly apply but I include them for 2 reasons, your question will show up in searches for help with blur so they may apply to other people and some of the fix can be applied in you situation even thought the fix specifies a different OS or application.

Screen Display Blurry - Fuzzy - Disable Hardware Graphics Acceleration

http://www.askvg.com/fix-bold-blurry-or-hard-to-read-font-problem-in-windows-8-1/

http://www.askvg.com/disable-hardware-graphics-acceleration-and-fix-blurred-font-and-cursor-hanging-problems-in-microsoft-office-2013/

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http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_home-word/office-2013-displaying-issues/f425da29-de7a-47b5-b0e9-8c2afd5817a9

Turn off High Contrast on Win8 release preview and check the results. To turn off the high contrast, try the below steps:

o Press Windows Key +R, type in Control Panel and click OK.

o Click on Ease of Access, Ease of Access Center, and then click on Make the computer easier to see.

o Uncheck all the options under “High contrast” and click on OK.

You may also disable hardware graphic acceleration and check.

1.   Click the File tab.

2.   Click Options.

3.   Click Advanced.

4.   Under Display, select the Disable hardware graphics acceleration check box.

5.   Also try changing the box for “Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen”

6.   Click Ok.

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How to Make the Windows Desktop Work Well on High-DPI Displays and Fix Blurry Fonts on win 8.1

http://www.howtogeek.com/175664/how-to-make-the-windows-desktop-work-well-on-high-dpi-displays-and-fix-blurry-fonts/

<snip>

Upgrade to Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 offers much improved display scaling for high-density displays. If you’re still using Windows 7 — well, you shouldn’t use Windows 7 on a high-density display. New laptops with high-density displays will come with Windows 8.1 — stick with Windows 8.1 and don’t try downgrading them. Windows 8.1 can be configured to work much more nicely on a desktop system and has much better support for high-DPI displays.

Control System-Wide Display Scaling

To access this setting, right-click the Windows desktop background and select Screen resolution. Click the “Make text and other items larger or smaller” link in the Screen resolution window and you’ll be able to set a custom scaling level for your display.

Fix Blurry Fonts in Specific Applications

Many third-party desktop applications have blurry fonts when scaling is used. Windows 8.1 enables DPI scaling for all desktop apps, and ones that aren’t high-DPI aware will have blurry or fuzzy text, especially when they’re blown up to 200%.

To fix this problem, you can disable display scaling for specific apps. To do so, right-click the desktop application’s shortcut and select Properties. If the application is on the taskbar, right-click the taskbar icon, right-click the application’s name, and select Properties.

Click the Compatibility tab and click the “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” checkbox. After you do, close the application and re-open it.

Fonts will no longer appear blurry in the application, but graphical elements will likely be much smaller. This is a trade-off you’ll have to make. Depending on the program, you may be able to enlarge fonts and other graphical elements in its preferences window to make them appear larger and compensate for the loss of proper scaling,

You could also just disable DPI scaling system-wide by selecting 100% scaling in the control panel screen above. If you did this, everything would appear smaller. Whether this is acceptable depends on how pixel-dense your screen is and how good your eyesight is.

</snip>

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November 18, 2013    'Blurry fonts' bug KB 2670838 persists with IE11 and Windows 7

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/blurry-fonts-bug-kb-2670838-persists-ie11-and-windows-7-231035

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Another fix disable Scaling on High DPI settings

PPT 2013 Poor Scaling (Fuzzy/Blurry) on High-Res Display

Normally, this would be very simple. You just:

·      Right-click on your PowerPoint shortcut, and select Properties

·      Go to the Compatibility Tab

·      Check the “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” checkbox

·      Click OK / Apply

·      Relaunch PPT

Presto chango, problem solved. However, PPT15 is a 64-bit application, which means that these checkboxes are grayed out and cannot be changed from this UI.

The only solution I found was to edit the registry manually (caution: this is generally a very dangerous thing to do, so be very careful with this)

·      Type Windows Key + R to open the run dialog

·      type “regedit” and click OK

·      Expand the tree to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > AppCompatFlags > Layers

·      Click on the “Layers” node in the tree

·      Right-click in the right hand side of the window (where it says Name / Type / Data) and select New > String Value

·      In the name of the key item that is created, enter the location of your POWERPNT.EXE file (mine was “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\POWERPNT.EXE”) and hit Enter

·      Now, right click the key that was created and select Modify

·      In the Value Data text box, enter “~ HIGHDPIAWARE” and click OK

·      Close the registry editor, and try reopening PPT

If your problem was scaling on high DPI displays, the problem should be solved.

To confirm that you edited the registry correctly, follow the first set of directions above to view the compatibility settings of PowerPoint in the UI. The checkbox will still be grayed out, but it will now be checked.

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Blurriness or distortion on newer NVIDIA graphics cards

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/office-2013-known-issues-HA102919019.aspx

If you turn on the Manage 3D Setting on AntiAliasing – FXAA option for newer NVIDIA cards, you’ll see distortion or blurriness. This option is off by default because the option states “enabling this setting global may affect all programs rendered on the GPU, including video players and the Windows desktop.”

Workaround    NVIDIA has released a newer driver that you can download from the NVIDIA website.

Or since the above setting is global, you can click the Program Settings tab of the Manage 3D Settings and customize your Office programs to turn the global setting for Antialiasing – FXAA to off. By default, the Use Global Setting is the setting and will take whatever is set globally.

Turning off hardware acceleration also fixes the issue but we don’t recommend doing this.

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Blurriness or distortion on newer ATI cards

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/office-2013-known-issues-HA102919019.aspx

If you turn on the Morphological filtering option on the Gaming tab, you’ll see distortion or blurriness. This option is off by default.

Workaround AMD will be releasing a driver that will fix this issue. Or you can turn this option off. Or create an Application profile with this option turned off in the Application profiles group box at the top by pressing Save and pointing to the Office program executable (with the Morphological filtering option off).

Turning off hardware acceleration also fixes the issue but we don’t recommend doing this.

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Win 8 Enable ClearType Optimization

http://www.insideris.com/windows-8-tips-enable-cleartype-optimization/

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Explanation

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows\_8-performance/blurry-text-in-windows-8/ed053d17-b525-4e09-bdbc-de91114d975c

The cause for Office, Modern UI and IE10 to look so bad is that they use a new graphics rendering API offered in Windows 8 (and with updates on Windows 7, too). 

The new font rendering engine offered by this new API simply doesn’t have Clear Type implemented. So unless Microsoft patches this new API to support Clear Type, no program using this API will ever be able to do so.

The reason why Firefox (and Chrome, to an extend) are able to use Clear Type is because they still rely on the old Windows font-rendering API.

This is a bad decision by Microsoft, but their reasoningbehind that (from what i think) is also quite clear: It is based on the assumption that their future will be in the tablet market. Since ClearType only works in one direction (horizontally, that is), it is totally useless if you rotate the tablet. The other thing is animation: if you animate a Clear Type anti-aliased font, its boundaries will start to flicker. And since Modern UI is a lot about animations and transitions, this would offer a bad experience. 

Last thing is the much higher ppi (pixels per inch) offered by tablet screens (>200ppi) in respect to computer monitors (mostly <=120ppi), where grayscale-anti aliasing is totally sufficient for crisp fonts.

And the worst thing: the Surface has a display with only 148ppi! So fonts look crappy on their reference design tablet. 

The bad thing is: no one can help you with the font rendering problem. You’re on your own, as a consumer. For me that meant to downgrade back to Office 2010, ignoring Modern UI and all appscompletely and ditching IE 10 (but hey, that’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?).

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FireFox Blurred Text

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/953209

some People used About:config options to fix the problem

It's a known issue by now. I have the same problem after the 19 update, but when I disable Hardware Acceleration everything is fine. Click on orange Firefox button and then options > options > Advanced tab > General tab > and uncheck Use Hardware Acceleration When Available

This isn't much of a solution since the browsing speed is affected quite noticeable.

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set the gfx.content.azure.enabled to NO

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disable Direct2D by setting the gfx.direct2d.disabled pref to true

Note: for some people some bookmarks sub-folders content in the bookmark toolbar are totally glitched and became unreadable.

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However, I think I've found the cause of this mess... it's Internet Explorer 10! In fact the issue appeared after IE10 has been installed by Windows Update.

Try to uninstall it and the fonts in Firefox will be good again (hopefully Mozilla will fix this issue, though, as sooner or later we will have to update IE).

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You can also try to uninstall Windows update KB2670838 if you have this update.

·      http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2670838

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If you tried all the available fixes in about:config and Options|Advanced|General to no avail, there's one last thing to try. Get rid of the current Firefox in your system. That includes deleting the Mozilla folder from your Programs and from your User Application Data. Then down grade to a lower version of Firefox, such as 15.0, where the text in menus shows grayed out instead of smudgy. Then upgrade to the latest Firefox. This works n a Windows XP Pro 32-bit environment.

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Pictures Pasted into Visio become Blurry

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_2013\_release-visio/no-matter-how-good-of-a-picture-i-have-when-i/e8ab85f7-2f05-4eb7-afaf-a04eb09b9708

MS developer replied this is a known issue, being worked on.

One user suggests switching to DIA, a freeware alternative to Visio

Another user suggested suing freeware called “Inkscape” to create the images to be inserted.

Dear Doug,

I have a problem with blurry text in the body of Word  3013 documents. It is curious that Word commands, toolbars etc are all clear and the same body text in Excel 2013 is clearer (see attached snip). I have used the same font and size in Excel and Word.

I have followed many of your suggestions in this forum and have seen some minor improvements, but so far these have not solved the problem:

·         Checking video driver for the I5 processor trying several drivers, believe I am using the latest.

·         Dissable hardware graphics accelerator  on and off

·         Use subpixel positioning to smooth…    on and off

·         Playing with ClearType settings

I have loaded some other software (including Abbyy Translation), but the fuzziness problem prexisted these.

I use Word for most of the day and so this fuzziness is very irritating but the fact that the body text displays better in Excel gives me hope.

Any suggestions would be very welcome

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I have an old HP Pavilion computer with a Cupertino motheboard and upgraded the Processor from an Intel I3 to an Intel I5 and 8G of ram. This worked fine with my old HDD, WIndows 7 and Office 2007.I have recently installed a new SSD and loaded new Windows 7 and new Office 2013, this is when the problem started.

What version of Word are you using? Word 2010 and 2013 have File | Options. Word 2007 has Office Button | Word Options. Earlier versions have Options on the Tools menu.