Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

ClearType Tuning Utility

Musafir_86 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:17:03 GMT

-Hmm, isn't there's a ClearType Tuning PowerToy for Windows XP already? What's the advantage/new features of this over that one?

Regards.

I hate ClearType!

nomad27 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:14:44 GMT

Don't you people see the color effects in each letter?!

Some letters seem red, some seem blue. Overall it looks to me like a child used different color pencil to write each letter.

Microsoft - never ever disable the feature to disable ClearType!

Whenever windows 15 will only have ClearType with no other option, you'll find me with linux, mac or whatever google will have up it's sleeve by then.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Leo Davidson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:46:57 GMT

nomad27:

It's very dependent on your monitor and also your eyes. Different people sat at different screens will see different things.

You should try calibrating ClearType before turning it off. You'll probably find a setting that looks great for you.

For some people (and on some monitors) it looks bad no matter -- so the option should always exist to disable it -- but don't be too quick to write it off.

Sometimes it also requires adjusting a monitor's sharpness settings, by the way.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

ddahlstrom — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:02:54 GMT

You say that one of the motivations for the Clear Type vs. Bi-Level study was to find out why some people prefer Bi-Level. Curiously, however, you only show the comments by people who preferred Clear Type. What were the comments by the 5% of people who preferred Bi-Level?

to Leo Davidson

nomad27 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:05:40 GMT

I tried calibrating ClearType, tried it on different monitors.

I guess I'm one of those "looks bad no matter" people.

By the way in photography, digital chroma noise bothers me significantly more than grey noise.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Spong — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:19:41 GMT

Does Windows 7 support Cleartype rotation? In the past, I've found Cleartype looks bad when a monitor gets rotated, or you switch Tablet orientations, for example.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

fowl — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:53:33 GMT

It would be great if it were possible to tune each monitor independently, but as I understand it that would be almost impossible.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

fowl — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:55:11 GMT

It would be great if it were possible to tune each monitor independently, but as I understand it that would be almost impossible.

I would also like an answer to Spong's question... I remember seeing a widescreen LCD in a portrait orientation in an Office team video.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

NJKA — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:02:01 GMT

Great blog entry.

What I still cannot believe is the inability of the standard windows Gdi text functions to draw onto a 32bit hdc/ dibsection with alpha. Why is this so hard to do?

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

oggyb — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:02:25 GMT

@ fowl:

You can. And I have.

It is the very first step of the ClearType tuner after you decide whether to keep it on or not.

What about hinting?

jkporter — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:33:04 GMT

When Safari on Windows lots of people including myself were shocked to see how soft, almost blurry the fonts appeared to be in comparison to standard Windows rendering. However, after settling in I began to appreciate the fact that you could see all the subtle details of each font. In some cases the differences in rendering are substantial enough it’s hard to believe it’s the same font especially at smaller point sizes where I’m guessing hinting plays its role. I assume it’s a struggle between accuracy and better legibility, but it would be nice to have a choice.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Tihiy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:49:27 GMT

So wait. Is it possible to enable classic grayscale, not bi-level font output?

My eyes can't adapt to ClearType, and i spent a lot of time hacking Windows back to grayscale output and Tahoma font. Can this be back in future Windows version before i lost my vision?

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

saccharomyces — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:31:44 GMT

I'd like to second the call to fix ClearType on portrait-mode monitors. In addition, remember that Tablet PCs can be used in four orientations. On consumer tablets without wide-view screens, LCD color-inversion sometimes forces the use of reverse landscape. ClearType needs to hook into the rotation mechanism of the Tablet PC, and be able to adapt on-the-fly from RGB to BGR striping.

Incidentally, portrait mode is not a simple matter of making subpixel rendering run vertically rather than horizontally. I've tested this by rendering text sideways and rotating it -- it actually looks worse this way, at least for Latin letters. I suspect the hinting needs to be corrected because it hasn't taken vertical-striping into account.

For all the great work that's been done on ClearType in GDI, it's unfortunate that the ClearType text rendering in WPF is so bad. Even after they added SnapToDevicePixels after an outcry from developers, it still doesn't really work -- there are many bugs that cause this setting to be ignored in many situations. They're giving you guys a bad reputation. Microsoft can't do anything about Adobe Reader or Flash or Java, but it does control WPF, and it should make sure ClearType works as intended.

P.S. Very informative writeup. Corrects a number of misconceptions and clarifies a number of design points.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Jalf — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:07:27 GMT

I'm curious what the big difference is between font rendering on Windows and Mac. I mean, text has always looked nice on Macs, and there's no huge outcry about colour bleeding, or demanding the ability to go back to font rendering from a decade ago.

How do they pull it off if it is so hard to get working consistently on Windows? Do they just have consistently better monitors, or are the people who dislike the font rendering just afraid to speak up on that platform? ;)

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

oggyb — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:56:10 GMT

"I'm curious what the big difference is between font rendering on Windows and Mac. . . [...]

Here we know that there's a chance something will be done about it if we ask.

re: ClearType and horizontally striped (rotated) displays

GregH — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:32:41 GMT

@Spong & @saccharomyces

I briefly mentioned in the post that “the ClearType technology…performs reasonably well on…LCD panels with horizontally oriented RGB stripes.” I also note that “the biggest concern with ClearType in these non-optimal cases was the loss of text contrast.”

Ever since the first implementation of ClearType on the Windows CE platform we debated how to handle horizontal stripes. Vertical stripes work well with Latin based text systems because most of the high-frequency components need horizontal precision—exactly what we get with vertical stripes. Changing the ClearType algorithm to sample for horizontal stripes does not give us the same benefit, and artifacts like aliasing are very visible, especially in italic text.

Essentially the tradeoff comes down to higher contrast vs. improved glyph shapes. In the post I mention that we did an informal study to help guide us on this decision and we found that 70% of those that we polled preferred the improvement of glyph shape. That said, we still are actively working on ways to improve the symmetry of our solution.

re: Font Smoothing on Windows 7

GregH — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:35:21 GMT

@Tihiy

Classic grayscale is called font smoothing in Windows. As the post mentions, “In order to switch between ClearType and grayscale, the setting ‘Turn on ClearType’ on the opening page of the ClearType Tuner can be toggled.”

re: ClearType Tuning Utility

GregH — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:37:33 GMT

@Musafir_86

The ClearType Tuning PowerToy for Windows XP underwent significant updates for Windows 7, and now ships with the product instead of being a separate PowerToy.

The Windows 7 ClearType Tuner now will query information from the EDID information in displays to help guide some of the settings for the tuner. It also will tune the ClearType settings for the DirectWrite platform—which provides a much richer set of options than GDI.

One important aspect of type rendering on an LCD screen is that the display must be running at native resolution. When an LCD display is not running at native resolution all sorts of artifacts impact the quality of all types of text rendering. The tuner attempts to verify that each display is running at native resolution and provides an option for changing the resolution if it is not native.

DirectWrite also supports different ClearType settings on different monitors, and the tuner will present the “eye-tests” on multiple monitors. Unfortunately, though, GDI only supports settings for one monitor, which we generally presume is the primary monitor. This means that if one display is striped in RGB order and another display is striped in BGR order, GDI will only work optimally on one display while DirectWrite will work properly on both displays.

WPF uses the same settings for tuning as DirectWrite, so the tuning will apply to WPF applications as well.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Domenico — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:54:30 GMT

I Love Clear Type in Windows 7.

Go to RTM GO!!!

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

CSS2 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:03:40 GMT

For me, on all monitors I've tried, Acrobat Reader's rendering looks best, as in absolutely perfect. Mac OS X's text rendering (from screenshots) also looks stunning.

However, ClearType, regardless of version (XP, Vista or 7) or tuning settings, always looks just a bit off, enough to bother me. It has a slight but noticeable color fringing problem that I don't see at all in the two mentioned above. I think part of the problem is with the algorithm itself anf part of it is because of the fonts (too narrow/light? but bold ones don't look perfect either). I still easily prefer it to bi-level or grayscale, but it's a shame it's worse than the other two (and I've tested it on enough screens to suspect that, at least for me, it's universally worse).

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

thewonderer — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:30:42 GMT

Its great to see all the work being done to the fonts and GUI. However, why are the windows team wasting so much screen space on notification windows?

For example the Cleartype Text Tuner window wastes about 30% of it's space with nothing but a white colour. I've seen this creeping in within Vista and to see it in Windows 7 is a disappointment. I know monitors are cheaper and larger than ever, but this is not efficient and I feel sorry for the people with E PC's...

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Xepol — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:33:35 GMT

"not all applications will choose to render with the default settings. Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer will default in some cases to using ClearType rendering"

This was one of the MOST offensive design choices I have run into in years. When I set a system preference, I do NOT consider it a "suggestion" that applications can avoid because someone thinks they know what I prefer better than I do.

On XP, ClearType was unwatchable. Text was blurry and hard to read - no exceptions on any display or tuning setting. It was only a degree of how blurry. Check the IE Blogs at the time, I went from being supportive to practically foaming at the mouth.

Let me say it again: IF I SET A SYSTEM WIDE SETTING, I FREAKING WELL EXPECT IT TO BE SYSTEM WIDE. It is one thing for a third party graphics app to ignore the setting for specialized rendering techniques, but when software from the OS vender which is intended to be part of the OS ignores that clearly expressed preference? Well then, you have just spit in my face and shown me nothing but contempt.

Expect it to be returned in full force.

Fortunately, something in Cleartype has changed in Vista, because in Vista it is SIGNIFICANTLY more readable. Text is clear instead of having blurry color fringes (on the same hardware and settings no less).

I have seen Windows 7, and it seems to be following that trend, which is nice.

That said, if you continue to ignore user's well defined preferences, expect to catch hell over it, and believe me, it will be well deserved.

As previously stated, I think I hate XP's cleartype and IE's 7 choice to ignore system settings more that that stupid annoying 'click' noise that is the default on navigation. And I can tell you, I **REALLY** hate that stupid annoying click sound file - it is the FIRST setting I change after installing any MS OS since it was first introduced, without fail.

Arg. The whole thing just irritates me to no end...

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

sevenflavor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:56:02 GMT

Ha! So Microsoft finally admits the shocker: Windows 7/Vista Explorer/shell and (who knows what other parts of Windows) continue to use ClearType even if it's turned off. Is that a minor discrepancy in flexibility? Wait a minute! It sounds like it is one of the reasons I (and many others) chose to forever stay with Windows XP.

Since Vista RTMed, I've been screamng at the top of my voice in every forum and blog that for heavily anti-aliased and ClearType optimized fonts such as Segoe UI, turning ClearType on or off hardly makes any difference because the font itself is optimized only for LCDs. Does Microsoft not understand that some users (a sizeable percentage of the Windows userbase) won't switch from CRTs to LCDs and that some graphics and video-related professionals still require CRTs? With Vista, Microsoft gave no choice to users but to use Segoe UI, even if I hack the registry to switch all instances of Segoe UI to the Tahoma typeface, upon every logon, it'll reset itself to Segoe UI. Using the Windows NT 6.x family of operating systems has become totally unusable for users with CRTs (especially Shadow Mask CRTs) and I hope Microsoft is hearing us loud and clear and allows users to revert back to Standard Font Smoothing AND Tahoma or MS Sans Serif (which Windows 9x used) when the monitor is CRT. Installing Windows 7 on my 2006-ish desktop which has a CRT is useless because my eyes start to bleed after a couple of minutes and my head starts to spin. The blurring is just too much on CRTs that *enabling ClearType* causes eye fatigue by increasing squinting and decreasing the blink rate, but the same OS on my laptop LCD with ClearType and Segoe UI looks crystal sharp, even more sharp than Standard font smoothing. On Windows XP, I've had no problems with ClearType turned on on screens it is optimized for and ClearType turned off on screens it isn't optimized for.

Btw, even the bundled ClearType tuner as part of Windows 7 is a subset of what was offered as an XP powertoy and is crippled for less choice. I always install the original ClearType tuner powertoy which allows me to adjust the ClearType contrast setting by decimal values instead of visual appearance (yet you continue to boast about fine-grained control over rendering).

Lastly, there seem to be differences in XP's implementation of ClearType in GDI, Vista's implementatioN of ClearType in GDI and .NET's implementation of ClearType. XP's implementation is IMHO by far the most tolerable *ON CRTs* though traditional font smoothing is better on CRTs. I know .NET 4 will get GDI style ClearType but please allow us to revert exactly to pre-Vista rendering and typefaces to make reading possible on CRTs while using the newer OSes. The current situation where CRTs running NT 6.x are unreadable even if ClearType is turned off is very alarming. With this factor, upgrading to Windows 7 (or Vista) is out of question on my CRT-using computers. Why doesn't Microsoft perform their preference study purely on CRTs? Microsoft's proprietary innovation, (I applaud) is a breakthrough for LCDs, but it is not an improvement on CRTs and it's time Microsoft acknowledged that and gave users a choice instead of shoving it down our throats.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

CobraA1 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:59:46 GMT

IMHO, the ability to turn on/off ClearType is more than just the difference between CRTs and LCDs.

It also makes sense to turn off ClearType if you work a lot with graphics for print media or when taking screen shots.

In the case of print media, you're not concerned with how well it looks on the screen, because it will be printed. If you're taking screens shots, it looks ugly when magnified due to the color fringes also being magnified.

So for everyday use, it's fine - but sometimes we have to be aware of how it affects things when we're trying to do strange things with it.

There are some applications that may continue to manipulate a font after it's been rendered - with amusing and often ugly results with ClearType.

Of course if software wants to do such things, it should disable ClearType. But sometimes a developer forgets :(.

In any case, I do admire Microsoft for continuing to improve it.

But - I do want to echo the sentiments of Xepol and sevenflavor:

-I don't see why we can't just have three options in a single obvious place: Black and white, greyscale, ClearType. Maybe as part of the tuning process.

-Internet Explorer and other normal applications should not have separate settings. I can understand Paint ignoring it, because it it a bitmap editor. But not Internet Explorer.

-Do understand that the monitor is the most expensive component to replace, and is the least likely to be upgraded. Yeah, I'm still on a CRT. A nice CRT with 1600x1200 resolution, but a CRT nonetheless.

sevenflavor: Perhaps you could try using WindowsBlinds? While it is primarily a skinning application, skinning often involves font changes, and it allows for more granular (and hopefully more permanent) control over your fonts.

re: ClearType Printed Screen Shots

GregH — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:18:55 GMT

@CobraA1

Printing screen shots is problematic with ClearType. Some post processing of the bitmap might be possible to address this, but I’ve not seriously looked into this. Another thing that might help somewhat is increasing the display DPI to a high value before taking the screen shot. In this case the color fringes would have less magnification.

re: ClearType and horizontally striped (rotated) displays

swythan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:02:08 GMT

@GregH (+ @Spong & @saccharomyces)

Your information is much appreciated, but it wasn't really an answer.

Can Win 7 automatically "re-tune" (or even just turn off) Cleartype when the screen is rotated?

The biggest issue, as I see it is that when I rotate my monitor, the (graphics driver?) rotates the display, but Windows keeps doing ClearType as if it was still in landscape mode.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Vyacheslav Lanovets — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:39:23 GMT

In the Verdana example above I prefer “black and white” smoothing over ClearType. Verdana with so much ClearTypeness looks really burry – like on old cheap Samsung 3Ne CRT monitor. Fortunately, with ClearType tuner I could reduce blurriness to a minimum on my laptop running Windows 7. It’s still not as perfectly crisp and clear as raster fonts though.

I have it enabled on my Vista machines at work and home (maybe because there are improvements over XP or maybe only because Segoe UI looks horrible when ClearType is off).

I was not able to use ClearType in XP at all. Overly blurred text makes my eyes ache as my brain is trying to put the text into focus without success.

ClearType tuner should be distributed via WindowsUpdate. I discovered that such thing exists only after I bought WM phone sometime ago and found out that XDA developers coded special tool to tune ClearType on Windows Mobile; I decided to search something similar for Vista and found it. I was so surprised that it’s possible to tune ClearType and it’s hard to surprise me with software.

I noticed that on Vista some LCDs (Samsung 2253BW, TN) have lots of color fringing when ClearType is enabled and some look ok (Samsung 943T, PVA); in both cases correct “drivers” and color profiles are installed.

In the test mentioned above, if you were asking that eldery woman to compare font smoothing when rendering Segoe UI font, then she was absolutely correct. It’s more than obvious that specially crafted for ClearType font will look better with ClearType: no need to spend money on testing. I skimmed through MS fontblog and did not find references on what fonts were used for testing in this particular case (in another post they mention using Arial). Please, always mention such details or this “testing” looks like “silly PR” otherwise.

I don’t really care about ClearType issues but I know that some people are very annoyed by inability to easily switch to Tahoma in Windows. I do support their claims. I would like to disable ClearType at all on that LCD panel with noticeable color fringing.

re: ClearType and horizontally striped (rotated) displays

GregH — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:46:40 GMT

@swythan & al.

Thank you for the feedback. I stated the background in my previous answer but I did not state the actual implementation.

As you note, when the screen is rotated we do not change the algorithm from vertical stripe (typically in landscape mode) to horizontal stripe (typically in portrait mode.)

The decision not to dynamically change the algorithm in order to accommodate the changing display geometry is explicit, although non-intuitive as I mentioned in the earlier answer and post. The high frequency spatial information in Latin-based letter forms is only improved by the vertical algorithm. We lose some contrast with the vertical algorithm on horizontal stripes—which in my mind is very unfortunate, but the improvements to the glyph shape are very marginal at best using the horizontal stripe algorithm.

Using the ClearType Tuner can bring some improvements in the rotated case, but it will not be as optimal as the vertical stripe algorithm on a vertically striped grid.

We are continually investigating ways to improve the screen rendering of text, and this is one area that we are striving to improve.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

hitman721 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:24:16 GMT

I am really glad that Microsoft has done all this work, cleartype looks great. I am really love what Microsoft has done here.

However...

Upgrade Pricing includes:

Home Premium (Upgrade) - $119.99

Professional (Upgrade) - $199.99

Ultimate (Upgrade) - $219.99

Full product pricing includes:

Home Premium (Full) - $199.99

Professional (Full) - $299.99

Ultimate (Full) - $319.99

Preorder Price:

Home Premium - $49.99

Professional - $99.99

Wow. That is terrible. Talk about way too expensive. Microsoft just killed the buzz about Windows 7.

Steven, all this work has just been in vain because people won't buy Windows 7 at that price.

Looks like I'm going back to Vista for awhile.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Tyserman474 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:42:21 GMT

I like what they have done as well.

I am not sure about it at this point either. I downloaded the Ultimate edition and I see that they haven't given a price for that one yet.

re: ClearType and horizontally striped (rotated) displays

swythan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:37:57 GMT

@GregH

Thanks for the clear answer. :-)

TBH, now I think about it, the last time I actually tried rotating my monitor was on XP. I just tried again on my current Vista system and...

1) IMHO text does look worse with "rotated ClearType" than "rotated Grayscale smoothing"...

2) ...but it's not as bad as I remember from XP, I think.

3) The whole display looks pretty weird, so I wouldn't work like that anyway.

I think #3 is because of the viewing angles on my 20" LCD. Once the vertical viewing angle becomes the horizontal one, it's meaning the brightness of the images in each eye aren't the same, which is very uncomfortable. On top of that, I can now see a significant variation in brightness from top to bottom (what is normally left to right).

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that (for now) I'm unlikely to switch to portrait mode for the forseeable future (i.e. not until I get a much better monitor), but the reason isn't ClearType.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Rebel44 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:20:08 GMT

Does anyone know how much RAM will W7 HP x64 support? Vista HP x64 supported max. 16GB - will this limit be increased?

Tried something new today

Vyacheslav Lanovets — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:43:00 GMT

This discussion made me think about experimenting a little bit. I went and switched Vista's UI to Tahoma 10 and disabled ClearType at all. Wow, what a wonderful thing has happened. Aero + Tahoma 10 look gorgeous. Let alone my second LCD which is vertically oriented.

Unfortunately Office 2007 menus look ugly, some script fonts become plainly unreadable.

I feel like while Word document might look blurred a little bit, menus and buttons should not look blurred but they do in Vista and Windows 7.

Microsft is complete aware of this. Beat Stamm in http://www.typophile.com/node/33005#comment-197660

says: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people are fine with Method C when reading continuous text at 96 dpi (e.g. Times Reader, etc.) but not in UI scenarios."

This means that ideally there should exist such ClearType tuner which would allow to exclude specific font/size combinations from "Cleartype" processing.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

KooKiz — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:18:10 GMT

I'm one of these guys who prefer bi-level rendering, so I'd like to provide some feedback.

I think ClearType is far more "beautiful" than bi-level. However, years ago, when I tried it on a LCD screen at work (I had a CRT screen at home back then), I thought the font were blurred, and quickly reverted back.

About one year ago, I finally bought myself a LCD screen (LG L227WT-PF). The first thing I did was turn on cleartype. Then I started the long process of tuning the screen colors, contrast, and brightness.

After three days, I was really worrying because, no matter the settings I tried on the screen, I was still having the feeling that the screen was blur, without understanding why. And I was getting headaches after about 30 minutes, making my computer unusable.

Then, while browsing randomly through display options, I ran across font smoothing, and disabled it. And that did the trick, the headaches didn't come back since that day.

I don't know where this come from. Maybe the quality of the two screens was poor, maybe it comes from my eyesight... Whatever the reason is, it is clear that I can't bear with font smoothing.

re: Tried something new today

GregH — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:34:09 GMT

@Vyacheslav Lanovets

Your quote does not describe the “Method C” which is quite important for understanding the context of this statement.

Method C is a description of a technique called sub-pixel positioned ClearType. This is a method of spacing characters using sub-pixel accuracy which is very useful for typesetting pages of text where techniques like kerning and optical alignment of margins play an important role in the beauty and readability of a page. This technique is also very useful for making text that is resolution-independent and easily scales across multiple screen and print resolutions. This method does have a cost, which is thoroughly described in the text of the comment that you refer, but I can summarize by saying it has a net loss of contrast. ClearType tuning, as I mentioned in the ClearType with rotation comment, can often help with this contrast loss.

ClearType sub-pixel positioning, or “Method C” is only available in the WPF or DirectWrite platforms and is not used in Office 2007 menus or other parts of Office 2007. There are additional tuning capabilities for DirectWrite and WPF specifically for helping to increase the text contrast with these techniques—and these are adjustable with the ClearType Tuner.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

Gamer_Z. — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:11:22 GMT

I will give you that ClearType is nice for reading. But as someone who has had to attempt to do pixel-level editing of very small fonts with ClearType enabled, I ask that you PLEASE leave in the option to disable ClearType!

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

blub — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:56:49 GMT

The Clear Type Tuner has two big flaws:

1. It only shows examples using one font with one font size. Some times i run the tuner and pick what looks best but then i open up another application and everything looks really wierd. Showing different fonts and sizes would help a lot. Also the ability to pull in sliders and see the results in the actual application(WITHOUT having to pull the window offscreen and back to force a repaint) would really help.

2. The blue selection box influences how i think the example text looks. Some times i think one option looks better than another and then i switch and suddenly the other looks better. Make the box more discrete and again: sliders for total customization.

And i have to upvote what someone above said:

> -I don't see why we can't just have three

> options in a single obvious place: Black and

> white, greyscale, ClearType. Maybe as part

> of the tuning process.

I didn't even know that grayscale smoothing was included until i read this post(i've had 7 installed since january and i've been looking for this option several times).

And please fix better support for rotated displays and different modes for multi-monitor setups! I've tried several different monitors in rotated mode but none comes even close to the quality you get in default orientation. For coding it really helps to have one of your monitors in portrait-mode.

Console applications and ClearType bug?

Snusman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:51:12 GMT

Will Windows 7 include a fix for ClearType bug that leaves "garbage" on top of concole application windows (Far Manager for example)?

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

pbz — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:32:26 GMT

I've skipped Vista, so I don't know about that, but I've been using W7 for a while. I can't stand ClearType... regardless of what I do to adjust it, the text looks blurry and makes my head hurt after a while. And no, I don't like how Apple does it either; that's actually even worse. The way text was rendered in the original XP and in Windows Server 2003 and 2008 is how I like it.

I personally think it has to do with how well, how sharp your eyesight is. That's my theory so far. On a 21 inch monitor at 1600x1200 resolution staying about two feet away from the monitor I can see the pixel grid. I can tell where one pixel ends and another begins. When you use ClearType everything looks blurry because it is blurry. Now, on a higher dot per inch monitor, my laptop's 17 inch 1920x1080 resolution ClearType doesn't bother me nearly as much. I actually don't really notice it unless I get close to the monitor. This is why I think it has to do with your eyesight. Looking at my laptop I can see why people may be OK with it or even like it, looking at my big LCD I can see why people would hate it.

The problem with W7 is that if turn off ClearType, disable font smoothing, replace the default font to the server font (I think it's Tahoma) to make it look like XP some applications will obey and some won't. Anything in the control panel is a good example of where my settings are ignored. It totally ignores the system settings and does its rendering the blurry way. There are other places in the OS that are just not listening, for NO good reason. I have no CT in the start menu, but the clock still renders using CT or some kind of blurring. The menus in programs are the XP way while tooltips are blurred. Right now, as far as text rendering goes the W7RC is a MESS!!!

Please please... tell me somebody's going to go and fix all this before RTM...

Best yet

griffinme — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:43:04 GMT

I have to say that Win7 cleartype is the best yet. I use XP at work with an LCD and even after using the cleartype tuning tool it still looks wrong in some applications, in particular with Dynamics GP 9. At home I am running Win7 on a laptop with LCD obviously and a desktop with a CRT and the font looks great on both. I have noticed that Win7 likes to run at the highest resolution possible and then expand things to look right. I have to say I am very excited about it and have sold my dad and brother on it. If there was more support for older hardware it would be on my wife's computer as well.

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

paulmorriss — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:57:59 GMT

Can I second the request for cleartype support on multiple monitors?

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

BlindBat — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:36:23 GMT

ClearType is better than bi-level font smothing, but I prefer no font smoothing at all. It just looks blurry to me. It's too bad, because I really like Windows 7 but the font smoothing is just killing me. Is it too late to hope that we'll be give the choice to remove any font smoothing at all?

Cleartype or Blurredtype ?

hyperioneX — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:54:01 GMT

Can you disagree with the fact that cleartype cannot look always perfect on all combination of LCD/CRT monitor and with any screen resolution?

If you do there is no reason to add a feature to disable cleartype completely... But it cannot be true, so please let the user choose what suits him best.

If my understanding of the subpixel rendering technique is good, the optimal result should be obtained when using true native display resolution.

But on my 52" LCD TV (for example) in 1080p some fonts with cleartype looks blue, brown, BAD! Only in lower resolutions due to hardware interpolation it looks approximately good…

Secondary landscape

micahbro — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:10:37 GMT

Although it's sometimes disabled by the driver or OEM, many Tablet PC users prefer the upside-down "secondary landscape" rather than "primary landscape" screen orientation when using their tablet convertibles in tablet mode, because this keeps the connector ports and the like from poking them in the belly! Unfortunately, ClearType doesn't seem to have been fixed to handle the reversal of subpixel ordering. If you're read all your text as mirror-imaged screenshots, though, it looks great. ;)

Hope this gets fixed!

re: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7

GregH — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 03:38:00 GMT

@micahbro

The ClearType Tuner will help you out in this situation. Once you change to “secondary landscape” run the tuner and the text should be fine.

Note that for many applications this will only benefit the primary monitor, but in the case of a TabletPC this should be fine.