Turn off Cleartype in Chrome

[calyco]

I just restarted my PC and suddenly Chrome has cleartype on, anyone know how to turn it off? TIA

 

[nickbits]

Assuming you mean it is blurry, open the chrome shortcut and click the compatibility tab. Check the dpi scaling option. I forget exactly what it is called. There is another way to do it via chrome://flags or something but I'm not sure about that.

 

[postmortemIA]

it is not cleartype, cleartype has been default since vista. it is hardware acceleration... both have been enabled on internet explorer and firefox for a while

 

[code65536]

it is not cleartype, cleartype has been default since vista. it is hardware acceleration... both have been enabled on internet explorer and firefox for a while

It's not hardware acceleration, it's hinting. (That link is very much worth a read, and the rest of this post assumes that you've read it or that you already understand what hinting is.)

Windows GDI font rendering is heavily hinted (it's why text on Windows looks so beautiful on low-DPI screens). However, the new hardware-accelerated APIs in Windows are, by default, unhinted (or very lightly hinted--I can't remember). This produces a more "faithful" text and text that scales more smoothly (e.g., if you have a text animation that grows the text from 10pt to 100pt, that animation will be smooth with unhinted rendering and will be jerky with hinted rendering).

When IE switched to hardware-accelerated text rendering, it got unhinted text. That's why some text looks a bit smaller than before, and why text don't look quite as sharp and clear as before.

When Firefox switched to hardware-accelerated text rendering, there was quite a bit of controversy, and a lot of people (including myself) argued that the benefits of hinting outweighed the downsides (most of the text that we see is static text for reading--we should thus optimize for on-screen readability, not for print fidelity or for text animations because, well, we know how people just loved the blink tag, right?). The compromise that was reached was that there was a list of fonts that would get the classic GDI-style full-on hinting treatment. This included the UI fonts like Segoe UI and all the common core web fonts like Arial and Verdana. This list of exemptions is configurable and can be found in about:config under "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families". However, these exempted fonts still use hardware-accelerated rendering. It's just that Firefox is passing a parameter that says that it wants classic GDI-style hinting.

 

[calyco]

OK finally fixed, disabled DirectWrite in chrome://flags.

 

[s44]

Is there another fix to the horrible text besides turning off DirectWrite altogether? I've tried switching fonts and tuning Windows Cleartype to no avail.

AT forums look absolutely atrocious now. Thank god for Tapatalk.

 

[postmortemIA]

Is there another fix to the horrible text besides turning off DirectWrite altogether? I've tried switching fonts and tuning Windows Cleartype to no avail.

AT forums look absolutely atrocious now. Thank god for Tapatalk.

What size and resolution monitor you got? As far as I could see, the effect is worse on low dpi screens. Like 27 inches and 1080p resolution.

 

[code65536]

Is there another fix to the horrible text besides turning off DirectWrite altogether? I've tried switching fonts and tuning Windows Cleartype to no avail.

AT forums look absolutely atrocious now. Thank god for Tapatalk.

See post #4 in this thread.

No amount of ClearType tuning would help when the problem is that text is being rendered with typeface fidelity given priority over on-screen legibility--this is not something that can be solved by tuning. And, yes, high-DPI will help since the effect of hinting diminishes as the the typeface occupies more pixels, but that's not really a solution, either.

No, the solution is to complain to Google and tell them that on-screen legibility is more important than print/typeface fidelity (seriously, how many people give a flying frack if a typeface doesn't look exactly what its designers intended, as long as it's crisp and legible?) and that you demand that they implement a Firefox-style solution where they use GPU-accelerated DirectWrite, but with nice pixel-friendly GDI-style hinting. That's the only solution that lets you use hardware acceleration while retaining good on-screen text (either that, or make that change yourself to the Chromium source code and compile your own version 😛).

Or... you could use the browser that gives users a choice in the matter: Firefox. 🙂

 

[futurefields]

cany anybody tell my stupid self how to fix this in Chrome?

i tried the Directwrite thing in Flags but is alredy disabled? Thanks,

 

[code65536]

cany anybody tell my stupid self how to fix this in Chrome?

i tried the Directwrite thing in Flags but is alredy disabled? Thanks,

No, no. The option disables DirectWrite. So the default setting that you see is "no, I don't want to turn it off"--it's a double negative--and you want to instead say, "yes, I want to turn it off."

 

[KentState]

Glad I stumbled on this thread. Enabling the Disable DirectWrite fixed the issue for me.

 

[quanta]

It does not change the fonts in Chrome UI. The tabs, menus, and chrome:// pages still render blurry texts, and the black texts still look grey. It doesn't even work on chrome web store. In the case of CWS, it may have to do with the forcing of CSS3 font-smooth property, which doesn't seem to have a way to override site preferences.

There is also the LCD text antialiasing option (lcd-text-aa) that changes antialiasing behaviour, but that doesn't seem to work as well as disable-direct-write, but that's probably because I am already viewing the contents in LCD screen. It may be more noticeable with PenTile or Quattron screens.

There is also the Font Rendering Enhancer extension that fine tunes the font output, but it seems to just make font look heavier, and does not work as well as disabling DirectWrite, and still has the same limitations as disabling DirectWrite.