Unclear Type
May 19, 2009 8:12 AM   Subscribe

Some text looks blurry/smudged after upgrade to XP from Win2k.

This screenshot shows some text in XP (left) and Win2k. I have complained about the blurriness to my support team and they're working on a potential fix. What I want to know is: does that smudging/blurring caused by what I can only describe as layers being offsett by one pixel, does this god of headaches have a name? It would also be nice to know how I can make it go away.

Some details:
- Running at native resolution (1280 x 1024), 32 bit Color Quality
- The user interface text (menus, buttons) look fine (with ClearType off)
- Only certain fonts look blurry in Outlook (Palatino, Arial Bold, Times New Roman)
- All text looks blurry in IE7
- Everything looked fine in Win2k
- ClearType makes many things worse, while fixing nothing
posted by preparat to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
 
Best answer: The name for this is anti-aliasing, but I'm afraid I don't know how to turn it off.
posted by kidbritish at 8:21 AM on May 19, 2009


Best answer: You want to turn off font smoothing.

On the desktop, right click on My Computer and choose Properties.

Go to the Advanced tab.

Click on the Settings button in the Performance area.

Remove the check mark next to "Smooth edges of screen fonts".
posted by maudlin at 8:27 AM on May 19, 2009 [1 favorite]


After you turn off smoothing, when you turn it on again with ClearType or Standard, does it make a difference? I don't see much difference between smoothing on with Standard and no smoothing at all, but ClearType smoothing looks good throughout, although it looked smeared and purple to me when I first switched to it months ago. Either my eyes have adjusted or the problem fixed itself.
posted by maudlin at 8:39 AM on May 19, 2009


Response by poster: Thanks maudlin. I figured out a way to remove the issue in Outlook, by checking off the "Read all standard mail in plain text" option, but unchecking the "Smooth edges of screen fonts" did not affect the blurriness in IE7. Here is what your comment looks like in Win2K (top) compared to XP, obviously resized.

I think I will just have to live with this until my support team gets new drivers or something.
posted by preparat at 9:02 AM on May 19, 2009


Try the Cleartype Tuner. Your awesome screenshot is showing red/blue fringes on the letters, which is Cleartype and not just basic anti-aliasing. You can just turn ClearType off entirely if you don't like it. Or adjust it. One thing the Tuner will let you do is swap the left/right of red/blue. If you have an odd LCD with the colour elements reversed, it may fix your problem.
posted by Nelson at 9:03 AM on May 19, 2009


Best answer: preparat: "but unchecking the "Smooth edges of screen fonts" did not affect the blurriness in IE7."

You have to disable Cleartype inside IE7 to make it stop antialiasing text. link
posted by Memo at 9:04 AM on May 19, 2009


Response by poster: Memo - that's exactly what I needed for IE, thanks a million!

Nelson - I did try the tuner many times, but ClearType just makes thing worse for me, so I got nowhere.

So, in conclusion, Outlook has been forced into behaving and text on Metafilter looks nice and crisp. Which is what this whole Minor Anti-Aliasing Panic of 2009 was really all about to begin with.

Thank you all!
posted by preparat at 9:17 AM on May 19, 2009


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