Windows – How to render fonts in Windows 8 like in XP

anti-aliasingcleartypefontswindows 8

I just got new PC and upgraded from XP to Windows 8 (yeah I skipped Vista and Win7) and now I have a problem with all this font rendering with smoothing-antialiasing-ClearType crapola. It is hard to read smaller fonts and to work as a web designer/css/html and etc., it's simply impossible, small fonts are totally unreadable and it hurts my eyes.

How do I make it render fonts in sharp pixels without any antialiasing/smoothing effects on Windows 8? Just like in good old XP?

I found that ClearType settings in Control Panel and disable it, but it wrecks the fonts totally and makes it even worse.

So I also Google'd a lot and found out some registry hacks and etc, it kinda fixed the problem, all fonts sharp and no antialiasing and etc. But now there's another problem. Firefox is not rendering the web fonts/Google fonts/the ones that comes in smooth/antialiasing by default.

So how do I keep antialiasing web fonts support on Firefox and how I keep sharp non-cleartype fonts on Windows 8 system/folder/tabs/windows at the same time?

This is serious, I cannot work on my projects with crazy issues like this.

There's what I am talking about (the one I need is 'GOOD'):

Best Answer

You're one of the very rare guys who dislike font smoothing. I cannot live with those ugly, eye hurting XP-style rendering type. But if you really want to change rendering mode, try this.

Mactype is another good option. It's an open source replacement (among others, but right now it's the most updated) for Windows font renderer based on FreeType. You can try different rendering mode, or even disable anti-aliasing completely

Steps I took when last installing Ubuntu afresh

Put your TrueType fonts (.ttf files from Windows installation or e.g. the Microsoft Core Fonts package legally available on the web) in some directory, e.g. /usr/local/winfonts.

Edit /etc/fonts/local.config and add your winfont dir:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
<fontconfig>
        <!-- Font directory list -->
        <dir>/usr/local/winfonts</dir> 
        <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc</dir>
</fontconfig>

Run sudo fc-cache -fv to rebuild font information cache files. (Nowadays there's no need to create files like fonts.scale, fonts.dir or fonts.alias using ttmkfdir or other utilities!)

Then configure Tahoma 8 as the default font in your desktop environment (KDE's control centre for me; equally easy in the Gnome equivalent)

And that's it.

Alternative way

Another way is to simply install msttcorefonts package from Universe and run fc-cache, as instructed in this post on Ubuntu Blog.

The core fonts package doesn't include Tahoma though. But if you have it from other sources, copying the .ttf files to ~/.fonts/ (or /usr/local/share/fonts for system wide availability) before running fc-cache should be sufficient.

Windows – How to turn off ClearType and use whole-pixel anti-aliasing in Windows 7

To use whole-pixel antialiasing:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000001

Note that most Windows fonts are specifically set not to smooth¹ at normal (7-13) sizes (fareast fonts even disable cleartype at those sizes).

To disable antialiasing altogether:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

"FontSmoothing"="0"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000000

To reenable clear type:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002

Registry settings taken from an XP machine.

¹Above 9 PPEM, anti-aliasing is turned off until the main stems of the font are around two pixels wide, which is around 13 to 20 points, depending on the typeface. (…) Two pixel wide stems are usually chosen because there is usually enough “backbone” of foreground colored pixels to keep the stem contrast high. (…) So although font smoothing was the default, most fonts, when displaying text at typical reading sizes, would render them bi-level.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Best Fonts for Ubuntu

Steps I took when last installing Ubuntu afresh

Alternative way

Windows – How to turn off ClearType and use whole-pixel anti-aliasing in Windows 7

Related Question