why the fonts in word 2013 are blurry?

Anonymous
2013-01-31T05:32:47+00:00

rendering the fonts in word 2013 is horrible! 

Will Microsoft change it?

This is a similar problem like with Internet Explorer 9 & 10.

What is going on?

IE8 works good, Office 2010 also...

Then?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2013-02-07T22:33:51+00:00

Check under File>Options>Advanced>Display and check the box for "Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen" and also try changing the setting for "Disable hardware graphics acceleration"

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-02-04T09:37:06+00:00

    The fonts in 2013 are fine on a Samsung 7 Slate running Windows 8 64-bit.

    Can't comment about a laptop running Windows 8, but no issues with one running Windows 7.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-02-06T05:42:47+00:00

    I installed O2013 on the computer with a big screen. O2013 looks also horrible. Which means, that this product is really not worthy to be install... It is also not the continuation of their products. If they will not change it I will never update O2010 to the newer version.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-02-07T20:27:55+00:00

    Installed Office 2013 Pro onto Win7 Pro thru Microsofts Home User Program for my wife.  Took a weekend and 2 different tech reps and 3 phone calls and multiple downloads of offer from Microsofts website before got a clean' install per the software.  After installed, found the text unreadable in all Suite programs.  Response from tech rep was this was a new feature in Office 2013.  Sorry, can't fix.  Maybe Microsoft will do something about it as some others have complained about it, but he had no information on if or when it would change.  Oh, and then he informed me he had wiped out my wifes Office 2007 suite, so you can't go back to your old program'. 

    This system installed upon is < 1 year old; has Intel I-5 CPU, 8 GB RAM,  two monitors (Samsung 2253 and Dell 2210) and 4 TB of HDrive space.  No amount of changing anything in Office suite, Win 7 display settings, NVidia control panel (9600GT with latest drivers) or monitor settings improved the fuzzy fonts.  They first come up crisp, but after < 2 seconds, they fade to the fuzzy state. Includes all text within the Office 2013 windows.  Everything else on monitors remains as before.  Clearly (no pun intended), this is another Microsoft software development screw-up.  This shows again they have no comprehensive Quality Control program in their software development.  Heck, even PC Mag used to have rooms of typical PCs to try software out on for their evaluations.   With BILLIONS of dollars in revs, they can afford to purchase some samples and try this stuff out.  

    And they should also state that they intended to wipe out the prior version BEFORE they did so.  Would have been nice to put the older suite where it could be reloaded as part of removing this bag of useless software.  

    Now my wife doesn't have ANY FUNCTIONAL Microsoft software to work at home on; I wasted a weekend and am now held responsible for this fiasco.   Thank goodness I was able to download a copy of Open Office.  It works on her Office 2007 files.  She may just stay with it (and having to learn some changes to menus, etc.) and in spite of her company `guidelines', still it works and Microsoft Doesn't!

    Oh, and after 3 days of trying to work with this unreadable system, I responded to Microsofts customer support assistance email and requested they fix this or return the old program and my wifes payment with .... Nada, Silence, No Response! That was a week ago. 

    I had not updated her machine to IE 10 before this.  I will not do so either based on others comments that this issue is inherent to it, too.  IE 9 display is fine.

    That is my experience with this `great deal'.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-02-07T23:07:48+00:00

    Check under File>Options>Advanced>Display and check the box for "Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen" and also try changing the setting for "Disable hardware graphics acceleration"

    It does not work. I tried it. Microsoft screwed it up! It is about their "new" system of rendering fonts.

    Open please this link:

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

    and U will find Roland OH replay:

    "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 APIsimply 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 2010ignoring Modern UI and all appscompletely and ditching IE 10(but hey, that's a no-brainer, isn't it?)."

    Regards...

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