The Trouble With ClearType (and WPF)
Those of you who’ve been reading here a while will know I used to be a huge fan of ClearType. Huge fan! I thought it made fonts really readable.
Then, about two years ago, I started to get headaches. Big, nasty headaches. So I tried fiddling with display options – upped the refresh rate (sort-of worked, for a while), changed the colour scheme… Eventually I found if I turned off ClearType, the headaches went away. Finally, I could get back to the day job.
And then I upgraded my works machine to Windows 7… On the face of it, this was a good idea – I loved Windows Vista’s Aero theme, and 7 was 64-bit so I could use all 8 GB of memory installed, instead of about 2½ GB of it. Of course, Windows 7 defaults to ClearType, so just switch that off and…
…why is ClearType still on? On the task bar, at least. Where I’ve switched the labels back on. And then I upgraded to Visual Studio 2010…
It turns out that the Windows Presentation Foundation, the DirectX-accelerated GUI provided by .Net 4, uses its own font rendering system. And it only has one way of doing things: aliased. Oh, it sort of uses ClearType, but not very well. Google searches revealed myriad howls of protest from people complaining about the poor text quality, eye troubles, and other problems. What made it worse was Microsoft’s seven-month-delay in acknowledging the problem – until, of course, it was too late to do anything about it for this version.
So essentially, I’m stuck with a version of Visual Studio – VS2010 – that I will never be able to use. This essentially means I will have to re-train away from Microsoft tools as a health and safety issue, because I can’t continue to work with them (unless I decide I want to become hooked on painkillers).
You know, if hotels treated their paying customers like Microsoft are doing, they’d go bankrupt in months…
Tags: .Net, Cleartype, DirectX, Microsoft, windows, WPF