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Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

Just fix fucking font rendering, I did use Windows machine as my workstation for 4 year (although being in love with linux), But I had to switch to Ubuntu, because of ridiculous font rendering. I don't have money to pay for new monitor every 2 year, and I am quite happy with my dual monitor 27 inch 1080p until windows 10 changed font rendering to DirectWrite. It is fucking disaster in low dpi monitor.

As always Microsoft ignored their current users in pursue of new users. I haven't seen this attitude from any other company. I haven't seen apple make font rendering on old MacBook worse to force people to switch to new MacBooks. Or I haven't seen something similar from Google.

This is fucking total disaster.

As someone who reads text for whole day (programmer) I care about my eyes and it fucking hurts my eye to see font rendering in new UI (UWP) and Edge.

p.s. Old/win32 application do use old rendering engine and are acceptable.

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We're re-vamping some of our Windows products this year to support high-DPI usage under Windows 10, so if you could be so kind, I would be curious as to what exactly you're seeing that is causing your issue: is it that older Windows applications look blurry because they aren't high-DPI-aware and Windows 10 auto-scales them, or is it that you don't like the high-DPI look because it's too sharp/jagged, looks weird on older monitors, etc. ?

I don't want to piss off our customers by making their usage experience poorer under Windows 10, so I would really appreciate any input you can provide.

Quite the opposite, Microsoft changed their font rendering engine to introduce GreyScale (IIRC), But the problem with this new engine is it is horrible on low-dpi monitor.

Traditionally Windows does have problem with high dpi monitors, but I think there is workaround it (scaling and etc), but with windows 10, fonts on low dpi (by low dpi I mean most of the monitors sold until 1,2 years ago, 20+ inch with 1080p) windows looks like shit (literally). If you are using old framework (WPF and etc) it is okay, because underlying framework is same. Same good old rendering (not in par with Mac or FreeType, but quite acceptable). But if you are using UWP, then quite honestly you are in trouble, in low-dpi monitors. Because Microsoft UWP only does have DirectWrite engine.

The problem with old engine (which is used in Win32, WPF, etc) was it was slow on mobile, and as always Microsoft wanted to compete with Apple and Google on Mobile platform and because they have 99% market share of mobile os. So what is better option than ruining people experience in desktop to force them to switch to WinRT/UWP bullshit ? (I am being sarcastic)

Correct. I use Linux at home. Ubuntu and Mint have nice rendering OOTB, Arch got that great with the Infinality package.

OSX also has decent rendering (albeit too fat for my taste), Windows' subpixelrendering + matching fonts used to give sharp letters, yes too skinny, but legible.

With their new engine, texts are less legible. The letters are still skinny, but now they're also blurry.

All this to cater to the very small fraction that uses Windows on a mobile device; throwing existing desktop users under the bus.

Yeah, I honestly thought I had a hardware issue on a computer I built for my son with a 24" 1080p monitor and it turned out to be Windows 10 font rendering changes.

I use Ubuntu at work and my other Windows 10 machine has 1920x1200 monitors at a distance that makes the rendering regression not easily noticeable.

It's great for small 1080p screens on laptops and 4k monitors though. :-/

Exactly, That was my whole point, Microsoft tried vigorously to ignore me and you (their current users) to compete with apple and google.

Do you see the irony? Microsoft does suffer from mismanagement.

You should never ever mess with your current user experience to improve your imaginary users experience.

Oh. Is that why the text on the Win10 lock screen on my 1080p monitor looks like it's rendering on a 640x480 display? I'd wondered why it seemed so damn ugly.

This is so strange. I assume I'm blind to those types of things? I can't find any difference between apps here that you can see so clearly. Do you know of a site that goes into detail on what the differences are? I could just be font-rendering blind in the same way some people don't mind bad aspect ratios on their widescreen TV...

There was huge discussion about it in Reddit, I don't know any technical site or blog post about this issue. But the conclusion was Microsoft is not going to fix this issue, unless users make noise.

Thanks, I'll do some searching myself and see what I can find. I'm slightly afraid it's one of those things that will suddenly bother me forever once I notice it though. :)

Well there we go, I do see it now. I only see it as a small imperfection in some letters, but it does ruin everything as a whole.

Font rendering was improved in the Anniversary update. It should use ClearType in most cases on landscape monitors with 100% DPI.

This is not true !

UWP (which most of the internal app are porting into it), does use DirectWrite and there is no way to change its font rendering engine to ClearType.

I think you're right, looks like it was only fixed for Edge.

Discussion of technical challenge is here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...

It got better for Edge after anniversary update. But I would not call that "fixed", because it is not on par with ClearType.

Microsoft can go fuck himself, I am not going change my monitor/hardware everytime he wants. I would be much much happy with my Fedora/Ubuntu, or if I want good support there is always apple much superior to Microsoft.

Apple uses grayscale font rendering too, not even pixel aligned. It looks nice because all of their devices are high DPI.

Exactly, They know their hardware, and trying to optimize their software for their hardware.

Microsoft do know what hardware people use (in third world country I would say 99% of people do use low dpi monitor), but they changed and ruined people experience anyway. That is the main point, they don't care about existing user.

I bet if apple monitors was low-dpi monitor, apple would do everything they can to improve font rendering in their low-dpi monitors.

Do you see the mindset?

Unlike Windows 10, Mac OS X still supports subpixel font antialiasing (similar to ClearType in Windows 7), it is called LCD font smoothing there, e.g.: https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/os-x-yosemite-disable-lcd-font-...

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