Jagged font rendering in Windows 8 Metro and Windows 10, even with Windows 7 ClearType

Question

I've always been bothered by Windows's font rendering, but it really started to bug me in the Windows 10 Preview. All Linux OSes, including Mac OS X have clear, smooth fonts, but Windows's DirectWrite and ClearType think they completely solve the problem, and they don't. For myself, I use a program called MacType to smoothen the fonts, but it doesn't seem natural, and doesn't even appear in the Metro UI.

How come the official screenshots of Windows 10 show smooth, Linux-like font rendering like in this picture:

But it shows exactly like this when you try it out:

Solution 1

The first picture is probably a mockup made by an ad-agency which uses Macs all day long and can't begin to understand why anyone would want to suffer the terrible font rendering of Windows.

I'm using MacType as well, and it makes things tolerable, but never reaches the quality of actual Macintosh font rendering. I was hoping Windows 10 would offer a proper font rendering, but not yet at least.

Windows is a work in progress, so perhaps one day, but for now we have to suffer this hack they call ClearType.

Solution 2

It has nothing to do with your graphics card or anything else in your hardware.

Microsoft changed the way Windows smooths the edges of screen fonts. As a result, text looks blurry and/or jagged on desktop-sized monitors. The change was first made in Office 2013 and Windows 8 and is now also in Windows 10.

To be precise, they changed the anti-aliasing method for fonts from RGB subpixel rendering to greyscale subpixel rendering. And there is nothing you can do about it. (ClearType is still there, but of little use in solving this problem because the fundamental method of screen drawing has changed.) Microsoft's position on this is that greyscale anti-aliasing looks fine on very high-resolution displays on phones and tablets and they refuse to do anything about it for desktop users.

So if you read and write text all day, Windows 10 may give you eyestrain, and will make a £500 desktop monitor look as bad as one costing £80.

Solution 3

I was having the exact same problem - was driving me nuts. Some of the fixes suggested helped a bit here, or there - but there was still a problem. It was really bad in Outlook and in MS Word. Even tried swapping out hardware. Last ditch effort was to plug a mac into my monitor and it looked a bit better, but still seemed off, then I tried high contrast (Black) mode the fonts looked great, so I had an idea and went digging through my monitor's settings. I have Samsung MD230s and when I turned off the MagicColor/MagicBrightness the problem went away completely. So, check your monitor settings as well as all of the other suggestions that are being made.

Comments

[Paraney]

I know what you're saying, but that's not the problem. It seems that everyone is fine with it except me. This is an example of an issue (dev-metal.com/fix-ugly-font-rendering-google-chrome) with Chrome with using DirectWrite. This is exactly what I'm irritated by, not only in Chrome, but in the entire Windows.

[Paraney]

FINALLY! Someone who thinks the same way I do. Judging from the rest of these responses, I thought I was the only one! I 100% agree with you.

[RHaguiuda]

I'm 100% with you!

[Fizz]

Yeah that's the most negative bit I've seen so far in Win10... Google Chrome manages to look the same as in Win 7, but they use their own, Skia-based font rasterizer IIRC. I didn't get Office 2013 either (stuck on 2010 insofar), but I understand that only Word uses the new (and disimproved) rasterizer there [even on Win 7]; the other Office 2013 apps use whatever comes with the system IIRC.

[Fizz]

Related: superuser.com/questions/733931/… For some tech background why they've abandoned ClearType RGB: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=44803

[Fizz]

Basically the reason they've abandoned it is that they could not get it to perform on low-end GPUs (phones etc.) while doing fast scrolling. "[It is slow and jerky; that's why they switched to DirectManipulation. (Try scrolling while a heavy script is running.) DirectManipulation does not do any rendering. All it does is move sprites around." ClearType (RGB) required the font to be re-rendered on every new background [change]. You can't treat the rendered font/glyph as a sprite with that. The real answer is IMO Nvidia's NVPathRendering, which does render the fonts using the GPU.

[Fizz]

MacType unfortunately doesn't fix the apps that need this fix the most, namely those using Metro, Word 2013, IE10+ etc. One could also try code.google.com/p/gdipp ; both use the same underlying tech, namely FreeType.

[RomanSt]

This is the real answer, unlike the one that is accepted. What a horrible change. Regardless of whether you like or hate ClearType, Win10/Metro is far worse and is visibly jagged and uneven except on very high DPI displays.

[Mars]

Poor, 1990's tech font rendering in windows (any version) is the prime reason I am stuck with Mac OS for design work. OS's are all grown up, I wish the software engineers at both MS and Apple would just refine and fix current issues instread of just tossing out more features that no one truly needs or wants. A good OS gets out of your way, so you can get work done.