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IE9 Fuzzy Font

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kjx

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Where should I be going to change the ClearType settings?

The system wide one or is there something just for IE9? The fonts just look over-antialiased - making me feel like there is something wrong with my eyes with some letters. The letter even seem scrunched closer together, and also seem flatter (marginal reduction in height).

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Buendia

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I think it's due to hardware text rendering. I remember having that issue with FF4 B5 when I turned it on.

I also noticed the new font IE9 uses, but as I'm surfing right now, it appears it is gone, the font it displays is the same old every other browser uses.

It's the same font Opera uses.blink.gif

I think that hardware acceleration went off somehow?

image000y.png

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Descartes

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The problem I had is that after I installed IE9, it insisted on using ClearType (or something alike) on top of the other font rendering engine I installed (gdipp). It also appeared in every other application that used the IE's rendering engine.

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~Johnny

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The problem I had is that after I installed IE9, it insisted on using ClearType (or something alike) on top of the other font rendering engine I installed (gdipp). It also appeared in every other application that used the IE's rendering engine.

That's because that is how DirectWrite renders fonts, which Microsoft is using as part of their hardware acceleration. And Mozilla is using it too in FireFox, (And I think one of the Chrome Canary builds had it enabled too). You'll probably be seeing quite a few more applications start to exhibit similar font rendering in the future too.

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+Frank B. Subscriber²

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That's because that is how DirectWrite renders fonts, which Microsoft is using as part of their hardware acceleration. And Mozilla is using it too in FireFox, (And I think one of the Chrome Canary builds had it enabled too). You'll probably be seeing quite a few more applications start to exhibit similar font rendering in the future too.

Paint.NET is another app which uses DirectWrite font rendering. Hopefully other apps will follow suit soon.

What the OP calls a 'fuzzy' font looks perfectly normal to Mac users by the way - the OS X font rendering looks similar to that of IE 9.

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ObiWanToby

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That's because that is how DirectWrite renders fonts, which Microsoft is using as part of their hardware acceleration. And Mozilla is using it too in FireFox, (And I think one of the Chrome Canary builds had it enabled too). You'll probably be seeing quite a few more applications start to exhibit similar font rendering in the future too.

If your video card supports it, get the EDID information from the monitor itself and use those color settings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...display_identification_data

I know ATI has it as an option. Directwrite seems to be quite sensitive to that.

Night and day difference for me.

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JonathanMarston

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Try adjusting your ClearType settings. Search for "adjust cleartype" in the Start menu and run through the wizard, made a big difference on my computer.

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JonathanMarston

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What the OP calls a 'fuzzy' font looks perfectly normal to Mac users by the way - the OS X font rendering looks similar to that of IE 9.

IMO, DirectWrite's is better. OSX's antialiasing has a tendency to over-bold text...

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kjx

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The regular font's bearable now. I still feel like I need to get my eyes checked but whatever.

What is not bearable is how bold text is rendered. It's just horrible. You see it in the way [News | Files | Forums | Services ... ] get rendered at the top of this page. The letters just bleed into each other.

For the die-hard FF fans who won't touch IE, here's a screenshot:

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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Yeah, that's how DirectWrite renders text, it does the same thing in any app that uses it (like Firefox)

Edit: I also don't think DirectWrite actually honours the GDI ClearType settings, and it's up to MS to fix the issue with light on dark text.

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JonathanMarston

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The light-on-dark text issue is definitely annoying, but somehow they got around in VS 2010 which I believe is using the same text rendereing pipeline. Seems like they should be able to fix it in IE too...

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~Johnny

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The light-on-dark text issue is definitely annoying, but somehow they got around in VS 2010 which I believe is using the same text rendereing pipeline. Seems like they should be able to fix it in IE too...

VS 2010 uses the WPF .NET 4 text stack, which is a bit more advanced (and most people would probably say better looking) than DirectWrite. Infact in many cases, it's indistinguishable from normally rendered text. They could probably back-port it as an update to DirectWrite at some point, but there's no news on that at the moment.

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Elliott

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What the OP calls a 'fuzzy' font looks perfectly normal to Mac users by the way - the OS X font rendering looks similar to that of IE 9.

Similar being a key word there. I'm an OS X user and IE9 font rendering looks pretty bad to me at smaller sizes. It's leaps and bounds better than ClearType at large sizes (headers look great now; they looked horrible before), but there are definitely some issues to work out there.

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meccs

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Similar being a key word there. I'm an OS X user and IE9 font rendering looks pretty bad to me at smaller sizes. It's leaps and bounds better than ClearType at large sizes (headers look great now; they looked horrible before), but there are definitely some issues to work out there.

Yes I'm using a Mac every day and the fonts look very nice... nothing like IE9!

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Deo Domuique

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It's Mircosoft's problem, but not IE's or FF's. The problem coming from DirectX and MS trying to solve it. None knows when will be fixed. MS didn't said exactly when.

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eoes5991

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hey guys,

yes enabling compatibility view on ie9 makes the font back to 'normal'.

for me, it was like.. too smooth/anti-aliased, squeezed together, thick, fat, smth like that. when the text is bold, it looks horrible. This is due to directwrite?

switching between GPU rendering and software rendering doesn't make this 'abnormal' text 'normal' too.

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jbarcus81

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Where should I be going to change the ClearType settings?

The system wide one or is there something just for IE9? The fonts just look over-antialiased - making me feel like there is something wrong with my eyes with some letters. The letter even seem scrunched closer together, and also seem flatter (marginal reduction in height).

I noticed this as well.. so I went looking around and found they still have the option to enable "Always use ClearType for HTML*".. so I enabled it.. Looks MUCH better.. very clear font rendering.. give it a try.. may not be a fix but it seems to do the job for me!!

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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Similar being a key word there. I'm an OS X user and IE9 font rendering looks pretty bad to me at smaller sizes. It's leaps and bounds better than ClearType at large sizes (headers look great now; they looked horrible before), but there are definitely some issues to work out there.

DirectWrite still uses the normal GDI hinting, but now it's capable of placing the glyphs properly (via sub-pixel positioning). It's also got much nicer anti-aliasing, so headers (and other large bits of text) no longer have jagged edges.

Quartz can't actually do sub-pixel positioning unless you use a hidden API, I'm sure Apple will enable it eventually though (they enabled it in Safari to work around issues)

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Neowinian

Presto-X

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Where should I be going to change the ClearType settings?

The system wide one or is there something just for IE9? The fonts just look over-antialiased - making me feel like there is something wrong with my eyes with some letters. The letter even seem scrunched closer together, and also seem flatter (marginal reduction in height).

I am also having the same problem, I'm not sure if it is related or not but I have not had any problems with the fonts over the past week, everything has been working great on my end with the new beta, until today, I'm not sure if my system got new updates last night or what but the fonts on many of the sites we go to are jacked up, I will attach a screen shot. I have also tride to enable/disable ?Use software ending? and ?Always use ClearType for HTML?, all with no luck fixing it yet, has any one had any luck getting this fixed? It?s driving me crazy.

screen-1.jpg

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