Certain program on tablet pc won't display i's or l's

March 1, 2007 5:17 PM

An educational program on my brother's laptop called "Weld_IT" won't properly display any i's or l's. It sort of tries, but they're nearly invisible. As you might expect this is very annoying and makes for difficult reading. He's running Windows XP Tablet Edition. Resolution changes don't help, neither does reinstalling the software. The program looks fine on my (reg'lar XP) desktop. What can we do?
posted by Monster_Zero to computers & internet (10 comments total)

A screenshot would really help out. Most likely, it's a missing font or wrong DPI. Also, try different OS compatibility modes in the exe properties dialog. Maybe your brother's laptop has its DPI set to something other than 96dpi (check in display properties->advanced).
posted by aye at 5:28 PM on March 1, 2007

Could be truetype.

Right mouse click your desktop --> properties --> Appearance --> Effects --> and mess with the "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts".
posted by Mitheral at 5:31 PM on March 1, 2007

you mean cleartype, not truetype.
posted by tumult at 6:23 PM on March 1, 2007

If ClearType is turned on but looks like crap, you can probably make it look good again using the ClearType Tuner.

That version requires Internet Explorer to work properly. Fortunately, there's also a downloadable version that installs a ClearType control in the Control Panel.

To my eye, ClearType is still not as good as whatever Ubuntu is using for LCD subpixel antialiasing, but it's a hell of a lot better than Windows's "Standard" font smoothing method - unless you use it on an LCD screen that's not running at its native resolution. Then it looks like arse.

If you prefer to turn all the fancy stuff off, and live with jaggy but sharp text, you're in respectable company.

Make sure your tablet PC's display resolution is not set higher than the native resolution of its LCD, too. That will crap up everything, but it will particularly crap up text.
posted by flabdablet at 7:29 PM on March 1, 2007

Right! Screenshot! Totally forgot.

Cleartype Tuner was a good suggestion but it has sadly done nothing for the situation. As near as I can tell, the tablet is in its native resolution too (I can choose from either 1024x768 or 800x600, to no avail either way).

I had not thought of the DPI thing, though - that I will have to look into.

Thanks for the answers so far!
posted by Monster_Zero at 9:51 PM on March 1, 2007

It looks to me like the rightmost column of pixels on every character is missing, but only in that one subwindow with the nonstandard window controls. I suspect that the app has an inbuilt rendering engine for its own text boxes, that it renders text in those boxes character-by-character, and that it's getting the size of the glyph bounding boxes wrong; it's probably using points where it should be using pixels or vice versa.

If you use the same DPI setting on the tablet PC as you use on the one where this app works (most likely 96 DPI), it will probably mask the bug, but you should whinge to the software vendor as well. Send them your screenshot.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 AM on March 2, 2007

Judging by the color fringing in that rendered text, you do have ClearType turned on. Probably worth trying font smoothing off entirely (Display Properties->Effects->Advanced) before you go messing with DPI.
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 AM on March 2, 2007

I have the same problem when using GAIM or Gnaural on my WinXP laptop. Turning off font smoothing has no effect -- I would guess because GTK uses a different font smoothing "engine" than Windows. Or something.

My guess (clearly) is that your program was built with GTK and you're having the same problem as I*.

* "Me"?
posted by skryche at 6:10 AM on March 2, 2007 [1 favorite]

Hey! I just reinstalled the GTK Runtime Environment from here and I don't have your problem any more! You might give it a shot, though I imagine Weld_IT might insist on using the version of GTK that it installed itself (assuming my theory that it uses GTK is correct in the first place).
posted by skryche at 6:21 AM on March 2, 2007

Cleartype was the culprit indeed! Using the tuner may not have been the answer, but turning it off worked. The text displays fine now.

Thanks flabdablet, and thanks everyone who took time out to respond! Now the welding education can properly continue!
posted by Monster_Zero at 11:01 AM on March 2, 2007