A Display/DPI/Resolution Sweet Spot for Windows Font Rendering?

September 4, 2014 7:48 AM

Is there a display size/DPI/resolution sweet spot for font rendering on Windows? (Win7 at the moment.) Intuition says higher resolution on a smaller display ought to deliver better rendering. But, doesn't scaling happen above some DPI threshold that results in diminished quality? Realize Windows apps have more than one way to render fonts available to them. But, I can be a bit obsessive about this issue.
posted by justcorbly to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Modern (non-bitmap) fonts don't really work the way that you're describing - they're stored as vector/outline data, and this is converted to pixels. So, the more pixel density in the same area, the better!
posted by destructive cactus at 9:18 AM on September 4, 2014

Response by poster: Ok, on a 1920x1080 15.6-inch laptop, I find text in Windows a bit too small with scaling at 100 percent. (Won't bump it up because text looks progressively worse, if easier to read.)

So, more resolution on a screen of the same dimensions would produce smaller text of increased clarity. Not the answer, either.

Maybe 1920x1080 on a 19-21 inch display, if available?
posted by justcorbly at 10:14 AM on September 4, 2014

Windows DPI handling is still stuck in this horrid mess.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 AM on September 4, 2014

If you are finding text on a 1080p 15 inch screen a little too small to read, you might benefit from an alternate text renderer like MacType. They were originally designed to increase the rendering quality of Japanese characters but they are useful to those of us who find Windows' default rendering--even on my 23 inch 1080p screen--a little blurry and hard to read. The overall effect is to make text more bold.

Here's a screen capture I just took of the same text rendered with MacType on top and without on the bottom.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 11:24 AM on September 4, 2014