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Font rendering is a mess in Windows 10


oomek

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I have no words to describe the mess Microsoft created in the font rendering in Windows 10.

Just look at this explorer window. Some elements like title bar and address bar have a grayscale antialiasing, the rest has cleartype enabled.

 

post-385423-0-66436500-1438379509_thumb.

 

Ok, let's open ClearType Tuner and select a third option on a third page which is a grayscale cleartype.

 

post-385423-0-19304800-1438379567_thumb.

 

And guess what, it's still the same! This tool has no effect at all on the cleartype's color settings.

Disabling cleartype is no option, as the text becomes a total mess.

 

So the question is:

How can I force Windows to use that grayscale cleartype smoothing method on all of the GUI elements?

If this is some kind of a new font used on the titlebars, can I use it on the other elements by editing aero.msstyle or shellstyle.dll?

 

p.s. The reason of my post is that I use one display with RGB matrix and the other with BGR, So I have to constantly switch the cleartype's sub pixel matrix to get rid of blurred fonts.

 

 

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I'm not sure it's any more a mess than with Win 8.1 (and possibly 8.0).

 

As we've discussed elsewhere, I have had no luck in getting ClearType to render without color fringes since Win 8.1.  I know I *have* seen it work, possibly back in Win 7, or maybe Vista.

 

In my case I have two monitors on the ends turned up sideways, so they're neither RGB nor BGR.  They're:

 

R

G

B

 

I just did a test where I ran the ClearType Tuner and specifically chose the panel that eliminates the color for my left monitor while leaving the center and right ones alone.  Here are excerpts from a screen grab on 10240 spanning 3 monitors:

 

Chuck.png

 

I noticed one other little glitch...  Notepad doesn't seem to have a clue how wide its text is (noting the 3 different scroll bars).  That was the same text pasted into the 3 different notepad windows.  There are no extra hidden spaces or characters we can't see - I checked.

 

-Noel

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I have also noticed declining of font quality than on Win7. It does not happen everywhere in OS.
For example, some third party apps and start menu have correct font, but Control Panel and Ms Edge have troubles with its font.
My thought is that my 1440x900 resolution is too low for new font or rendering algorithm. Graphic card is discrete.​

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The sad thing is, wayyy back during the Win 8 previews I reported this to Microsoft, going to great effort to point it out to them.  I even complained to the Internet Explorer people, as they abandoned the ClearType Tuner early on and began rendering without any color with no way to configure it.  I guess they knew something about the newer Windows failing to properly support ClearType even back then.

 

It's like Microsoft just screws things up (on purpose?) and moves on.  And frankly, most folks DON'T notice things like this - but for those who do - those who care - this is a big deal.  It reduces your pleasure in using the OS every single day.  I guess that's the intent.  Microsoft thinks you should throw away your computer and just get a Surface.  Yeah, that'll fix everything.

 

-Noel

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Is what you are talking about the same as what people said in this forum?

 

http://www.tenforums.com/general-discussion/9087-windows-10-dpi-awareness-issues-blurry-text-125-a.html

Even if it is another issue :unsure:, the referenced thread is "good to know" :thumbup, as a side note the proposed (temporary) fix/solution:

http://xpexplorer.com/windows10_dpi_blurry_fix/

provides IMNSHO yet another of the "queer" ways seemingly this stupid OS behaves (bolded/underlined/coloured to highlight):

Why this is a small software program, and not some 'Registry Tweak' is because when you manually adjust the DPI settings at your 'Windows Registry'. Windows will reset your dpi settings every 2 reboots. Which means you would have to adjust the registry again (Microsoft forces you almost to use its new DPI scaling method).

 

I can understand how someone (in his/her perverted mind) might decide to do the "reset on every reboot" approach, but once every TWO reboots? :w00t::ph34r:

The same mechanism could be used to reset some other setting to a default every 10 or 12 or ROUND(Pi*e2) reboots. :(

 

jaclaz

P.S.: Link fixed

Edited by jaclaz
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 Maybe if we ID the graphics card, we'll know more. This would only work if someone reports back here that they have perfect fonts and using xyz graphics card.

 

Mine is not supported, so using windows8.1 driver: Nvidia GeForce 6150 SE nForce 430

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Jaclaz's quote is from here - http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/.

 

If you quote his reply, and switch the edit box to BBCode mode you can see it.  I have no idea what's going on with his post.

 

EDIT: Something's screwy with the MSFN forum, since it happens with my link as well. Remove the extra spaces from the following

http: // windows10_dpi_blurry_fix .xpexplorer .com

Cheers and Regards

Edited by bphlpt
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Yep, the board parser has some "queer" issues with that link, it "automagically" corrects it to either "url=" (which means "the same post") or to "url=/" (which means site root aka www.msfn.org). Strange. :unsure:

Copy and paste the "code" should do:

http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com
Inverting the order of factors, it seemingly works:

http://xpexplorer.com/windows10_dpi_blurry_fix/

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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Is what you are talking about the same as what people said in this forum?
 

 

 

No.

 

The issue is about how subpixel font rendering is performed across the system.

 

There are apparently a number of methods available to applications and various parts of the OS, and they differ in whether they follow the settings available for tuning font smoothing. 

 

This is an admitted oversimplification:

 

Back in the "good ol' days" there was font smoothing and there was no font smoothing.  Then someone invented "better" font smoothing called ClearType, which actually takes advantage of the fact that Trinitron-like displays, where there are three tiny vertical bars of color, Red/Green/Blue, repeating on the screen, can be "tricked" into showing more resolution by lighting up only certain vertical bars.  More on that here.

 

Anyway, ClearType either came with (or was later augmented by) a ClearType Tuner application which allowed users to adjust the characteristics of the rendering - for example how dark the font was rendered, and how much color was used for that "trick" I mentioned above.  That way, people/system combinations where color fringing feels like a problem have a way of adjusting.

 

Now the modern systems / font rendering mechanisms are seen not to respond to some or all of the settings in the ClearType tuner.  THAT's what's at issue here.

 

This can matter - a lot - to people who use monitors where the little stripes are in other than R|G|B orientation.

 

-Noel

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Is what you are talking about the same as what people said in this forum?

 

http://www.tenforums.com/general-discussion/9087-windows-10-dpi-awareness-issues-blurry-text-125-a.html

Even if it is another issue :unsure:, the referenced thread is "good to know" :thumbup, as a side note the proposed (temporary) fix/solution:

http://xpexplorer.com/windows10_dpi_blurry_fix/

provides IMNSHO yet another of the "queer" ways seemingly this stupid OS behaves (bolded/underlined/coloured to highlight):

Why this is a small software program, and not some 'Registry Tweak' is because when you manually adjust the DPI settings at your 'Windows Registry'. Windows will reset your dpi settings every 2 reboots. Which means you would have to adjust the registry again (Microsoft forces you almost to use its new DPI scaling method).

 

 

I have used the solution suggested here:

 

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/62528-SOLVED-Windows-10-higher-DPI-Win8DpiScaling-problem

 

They propose to add to autostart:

REG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v DpiScalingVer /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00001018 /fREG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v Win8DpiScaling /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001 /fREG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v LogPixels /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000078 /f

but these settings are for 125% scaling. I wanted to set scaling to 110% and only adjusting the first value:

REG ADD "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v DpiScalingVer /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00001018 /f

was enough to fix the problem.

 

I'm guessing that this is the cause of the issue:

 

Windows 7 - You set a 125% DPI scaling, everything looks perfect after logging off/ on. All windows, text, icons are sharp as if there was no scaling but that was the actual size.

 

Windows 8.1 - It brought a new feature where you can have scaling for only your current screen and diff. scaling for other screens (let's say you had a TV or external monitor connected). That causes things to look funny, some windows / text are sharp and fine, while others like for example the services.msc, event viewer, gpedit.msc windows all look blurry as if they were running on a non native resolution.

 

Solution, right click on the desktop, screen > screen resolution, then there is a blue text that is clickable (I think it says make this the default scaling for ALL my displays), after choosing that, everything looks perfect just like Windows 7, and in fact, a bit better than Windows 7

 

Windows 10 - It gives the same default scaling like 8.1 which is a different scaling level for each display which in turn brings back the same bug, some windows look fine and others look blurry as if it wasn't the native resolution. The problem is, in Windows 10, there is no option like Windows 8.1 to choose a standard scaling size for all connected screens which is why I am facing this issue!

Source: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/my-first-experience-with-windows-10-wow.777304/

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The reason of my post is that I use one display with RGB matrix and the other with BGR

 

One monitor and one the TV? Say thanks to Microsoft who drowned the effort to make a unified industrial standard on pixel positioning.

Edited by Anixx
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