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Office 2013 drops cleartype, fonts a disaster. Any way to fix it?

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urlwolf:
Would people here be up for collecting signatures (the electronic equivalent) to show to MS that they should care about font rendering? I could set up a site for that, if there's interest.

40hz:
Would people here be up for collecting signatures (the electronic equivalent) to show to MS that they should care about font rendering? I could set up a site for that, if there's interest.
-urlwolf (May 16, 2013, 08:07 PM)
--- End quote ---

Might be worth a try. But considering how receptive they've been to complaints and push-back on things like that 'ribbon' interface and Metro, - or their refusal to even consider bringing back the start button (at least until recently) - I wouldn't hold out much hope that a write-in campaign will matter all that much to the folks in Redmond. Especially on something like fonts, which they've never been to concerned about to begin with - other than to not have to license Type-1 postscript font technology from Adobe. That's the only reason Microsoft adopted TrueType to begin with.

Apple had developed TrueType - and gave it to Microsoft for free - to help establish TTF as the new de facto type technology. This all happened when Apple was battling with Adobe over Adobe's refusal to negotiate more reasonable licensing terms. Apple figured the best way to fight Adobe was to adopt a 'scorched earth' strategy and basically pull the rug out from under Adobe with their own free standard.

Microsoft, never a company to pay for something when it didn't have to, took Apple up on their offer - and the rest is history.  ;D

IainB:
This is on laptop screens:
When I was using MS Office OneNote 2007, the New Page Default template had a heading font that looked very nice - Calibri 17point.
When I upgraded to MS Office OneNote 2013, everything was glary and bright and the default heading font was Calibri Lite 20point. I thought it looked pretty awful, so changed it back to Calibri 17point. Looks much better now. The drop-down font size menu doesn't let you select "17" for that font, but if you type "17" into it, it accepts that OK.
Varela Round and Segoe UI look quite nice on laptop screens too.
However, for max reading comprehension, Times New Roman is recommended, but, if it doesn't display well or gives you eyestrain, then I'd suggest you'd probably be better off with MS Sans Serif.

IainB:
Btw, if you spend any time on linux (ubuntu), you may have realized the freetype rendering is superior to cleartype anyway. Fortunately there's a way to get freetype on windows:
mactype
I use it and it improves chrome's rendering quite a bit.
_________________________________
-urlwolf (April 25, 2013, 10:57 AM)
--- End quote ---
I only this week got around to trying MacType out. Results below.
I tried it 4 ways: (System is HP ENVY 14 laptop with Win7-64 Home Premium.)
   1. Appearance: Ordinary system (ClearType ON):
   2. Appearance: Ordinary system (ClearType OFF):
   3. Appearance: MacType (ClearType ON) Default setting:
   4. Appearance: MacType (ClearType OFF) Default setting:

See samples below:
  1 and 3 look the same. ClearType ON in both cases seems best for the eyes.
  2 and 4 look the same.

I tried some of the other settings in MacType, but they didn't make for any improvement over the Default setting with ClearType ON.
Interestingly, OneNote gets different errors with its OCR (AltText). I have put the AltText below the image of each of the 4 samples (see below), so you can see the errors/omissions yourself.
MacType didn't seem to play very nicely with some of my proggies and they kept crashing.
I think I'll stick with the ordinary Windows system + ClearType ON, and just put up with the glary "flat" design of the MS Office and OneNote GUIs.
(Click image to expand it.)
Office 2013 drops cleartype, fonts a disaster. Any way to fix it?

danno:
Try MS Gothic. It appears to be a non-aliased, non-clear type font. It appears a little "blocky" because of that, but it is sharp and not smudgy. It's as if MS threw this font in the Office pack alone because it doesn't show up in the Windows/Fonts folder.

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