http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Has-Microsoft-botched-up-Office-2013-font-rendering-to-appease-the-tableteers

I'm assuming that this thread was locked because it posted links without any discussion.

20 minutes ago, Ray7 wrote

I'm assuming that this thread was locked because it posted links without any discussion.

He's also on constant rant mode. C9 isn't someone's blog.

5 hours ago, Ray7 wrote

I'm assuming that this thread was locked because it posted links without any discussion.

I actually thought not writing a rant this time and just posting the links would increase the deadline of the posts.

C

3 hours ago, Charles wrote

@Ray7: The thread was just a pointer to another thread where somebody is whining about Windows 8 and Office 2013 because of a font misconfiguration on THEIR own system. It's a pointless thread that points to another pointless thread with nary any of it's own pointlessness. Get the point?
C

In that case I seem to have the same misconfiguration. Can you tell me how to enable ClearType on Office 2013 on Windows 8?

Outlook is especially bizarre as the message list uses ClearType but nothing else does.

C

19 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

In that case I seem to have the same misconfiguration.

I have the same issue. I'm still using Outlook 2010 primarily because the font rendering does look worse in Outlook 2013. As Sven said, it's mainly the text in the message's body that looks bad.

C

This shows that the regular UI components (ribbon, favorites/folder list) do not use ClearType, as the anti-aliasing in that image is clearly grayscale. Note that this is the case in every Office 2013 program, not just Outlook (the ribbon in e.g. Word also does not use ClearType).

This shows that the inbox message list does use ClearType, as you can tell by the coloured fringe of the text (ignore the Japanese text; MS Gothic does not support anti-aliasing and I've not yet figured out a way to instruct Office to use Meiryo in the UI).

Finally, this shows that while the message header does use ClearType, the message text itself does not. This is to be expected since I believe Outlook uses Word to render messages, and Word also does not use ClearType for document text.

This behaviour is unique to Office 2013. All of these UI components in all Office programs used ClearType in Office 2010.

I have this problem on two different machines: my desktop (ATI Radeon HD6850) and my Sony Vaio Z laptop (hybrid Intel GMA / nVidia GT 330M; the issue occurs using either card). Both are running Windows 8 with Office 2013. Both were clean installs (not upgraded from Windows 7, and they never had any Office version other than 2013 installed either).

Charles, if you are truly not seeing this problem I would like you to post a screenshot of these same UI elements (also under Windows 8) to prove that they are supposed to have ClearType. Because frankly, I doubt it.

EDIT: I tried disabling hardware acceleration, and it makes no difference.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-performance/blurry-text-in-windows-8/ed053d17-b525-4e09-bdbc-de91114d975c

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officeitpro/thread/3434e057-c01b-4570-ade6-51e7e70ab92d

9 minutes ago, dentaku wrote

I'm just making sure I get the facts straight.

The fact is that a bunch of design hipsters had free reign with no supervision. 

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670705/microsoft-new-design-strategy#1

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"Unlike other companies that maybe have one person at the top, we don't have a [design] czar at Microsoft," says Julie Larson-Green, VP of program management for Windows. Of Metro, she adds, "It's not like Steve [Ballmer] decreed it." One former longtime Microsoft manager put it bluntly: "I don't think Steve could even spell the word design." And unlike Steve Jobs, who was infamous for meddling in every detail of Apple's product launches, Ballmer didn't go to any of the rehearsals at Milk Studios for the unveiling of the Surface; his part was played by a stand-in till he arrived on the day.

.....

So Microsoft embraced design not because Ballmer suddenly discovered beauty or started futzing around with typefaces, but because Apple showed that good design can be obscenely profitable. "We have recognized the value of [design]," says P.J. Hough, head of Microsoft's Office division, "and we have decided to make it a much higher priority." A former senior-level Microsoft source who advised Ballmer puts it a touch more tartly: "They're placing an emphasis on design because the dollars sit there. They're looking at Apple's market cap."

Still, the Windows 8 designers can't quite pinpoint the origins of the company's new religion, not least because they have worked without attention from top management. According to insiders, Ballmer offered no direction to the Windows 8 team on the features of the new user interface. Windows president Steven Sinofsky kept him abreast of the team's progress, but Ballmer met with Larson-Green only twice during the development process, and he never got together with the team to green-light the design.

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We can only speculate as to why it's fallen out of favour - possibly due to its incompatibility with tablets that need to support multiple screen orientations.

2 hours ago, Quppa wrote

Seems very unlikely that the absence of ClearType sub-pixel anti-aliasing is a bug - it's missing from the Metro/Modern/Immersive environment in Windows 8 and also random elements of the desktop UI (the clock, the language switcher, Windows Explorer window titles, titles in taskbar window previews and likely elsewhere), not to mention IE10 and Office 2013.

We can only speculate as to why it's fallen out of favour - possibly due to its incompatibility with tablets that need to support multiple screen orientations.