Ugly Font Rendering

[rou]

So I've been using a laptop for a while, and just today I switched back to my desktop. I have a 1920x1080 monitor that I'm using. I've realized that most of my fonts, especially serif fonts, are rendering very poorly. I've turned on ClearType, and it makes a slight difference in sans-serif fonts, but not much elsewhere. Most of what I've found on Google talks about browser issues, but this isn't just happening in my browser. It's also happening in Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, etc etc. They don't smooth out if I make them larger or smaller. Custom-installed and system default fonts are all affected.

I don't know if there's anything I can do to fix this? It's driving me up a wall! ><

[The Dark Raven]

What is your screen resolution?

[rou]

1920 x 1080. That's the answer, right? It's the setting I have on the computer and the native resolution of the monitor.

[The Dark Raven]

That, yeah.  It may just be the font style rebelling against something that it was not made in originally?  (That's a guess...)

I have had that issue on older monitors, but not recently.

[Valthazar]

What size monitor do you have?  I use 27 inch monitors that only run a max resolution of 1920 x 1080 (meaning that the pixel size itself is larger than on many smaller monitors which are capable of running 1920 x 1080).  There is a bit of distortion, but barely noticeable.

Could this be a factor?

[rou]

What size monitor do you have?  I use 27 inch monitors that only run a max resolution of 1920 x 1080 (meaning that the pixel size itself is larger than on many smaller monitors which are capable of running 1920 x 1080).  There is a bit of distortion, but barely noticeable.

Could this be a factor?

Mm, I'm not sure. My monitor is a 20 or 22 inch, I think. There are more pixels per inch than on the laptop, I believe; on the laptop I could visibly see every pixel if I looked, which I can't do on this one.

EDIT: The thing is, partially: when I'm looking at pictures of the fonts, which are of course jpgs or pngs or whatnot, the pictures look very nice. But if I zoom the font to the same size, it still looks jagged and ugly, rather than smooth. So I feel that it's a problem with the rendering rather than the display overall. But this is just guessing on my part.

[Vekseid]

Wonder if you managed to turn off anti-aliasing somewhere...

[rou]

Wonder if you managed to turn off anti-aliasing somewhere...

I did play with the anti-aliasing settings trying to fix it, because it definitely seemed like that was a big part of the issue. But I wasn't sure if that should have affected images as well and not just font.

In the end, I played around with my monitor settings. I turned the contrast down a little and the sharpness down a lot, so now things are kinda blurry but at least it helped with some staple fonts and I don't want to tear my eyes out so bad.

[Vekseid]

I did play with the anti-aliasing settings trying to fix it, because it definitely seemed like that was a big part of the issue. But I wasn't sure if that should have affected images as well and not just font.

In the end, I played around with my monitor settings. I turned the contrast down a little and the sharpness down a lot, so now things are kinda blurry but at least it helped with some staple fonts and I don't want to tear my eyes out so bad.

Anti-aliasing will only affect things that are rendered in some fashion. This includes fonts, but not images outside of e.g. .svg images.