Turning ClearType off, even when you already have it off

Feb-23-07, 2:23 pm by Hanford
File under: Misc., Bad User Interface

Have you noticed that some of the applications you use are rendering text with Cleartype, even though you have turned Cleartype off in Control Panel? So did I. So I tracked down why it was happening and I fixed it.

I hate Cleartype. Cleartype is the Windows OS setting that uses sub-pixel antialiasing to make the curves in letters to look smoother. I hate it because it sacrifices color accuracy in exchange for edge accuracy, and I guess my eye is extra sensitive to the color shift, because it bugs the hell out of me. It also screws up screenhots. Whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I do is turn off Cleartype.

Applications rendering text with Cleartype even though its turned off

Recently I noticed a few different apps on my system was mysteriously using Cleartype even though I have it turned off. One of these apps was Yahoo Instant Messenger. There were a few others as well, although I can't think of what they were offhand. What was causing this? I double checked to make sure it was off in the Control Panel. I tried to think of what I had changed recently, and the only thing I could think of was that I had upgraded my nvidia drivers.

But I just discovered the culprit: Internet Explorer 7. IE 7 was automatically installed on my system as part of Windows Update. I didn't really realize it because I've been using Firefox for a while. But IE7 has it's own application-specific Cleartype setting, and it doesn't appear to default to what your OS-level Cleartype setting was.

But there's a lot of applications out there that use IE as a plug-in for rendering text. Yahoo IM is one of them, and as a result of installing IE7 all of it's text rendering has Cleartype enabled. Turning off Cleartype in IE7 then rebooting your computer will fix this.

How to turn off Cleartype in IE7

Open IE7.
Choose Internet Options from the Tools dropdown
Click on the tab labeled Advanced
Scroll the list down until the Multimedia heading pops up
Uncheck the box that says "always use Cleartype for HTML"
Restart your computer for the setting to take effect.

How to turn off Cleartype in general

Open Control Panel
click on Display
Click on the tab labeled Appearance
Click on the button labeled Effects in the lower-right
Uncheck the box labeled "use the following effect to smooth the edges of screen fonts
Alternatively, if you want anti-aliasing but without the color bias that Cleartype creates, change the dropdown to Standard

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Jessica Davis wrote: May-4-09, 8:27 am

Amen, brother!

ClearType is shit for anybody with decent colour vision. The fringing is horrid.

Jeff wrote: Jun-4-07, 4:56 am

Clear type is a nightmare simply because once again Microsoft believes it knows best for the masses by having it turned on by default in both OS and IE. From a design perspective it's just awful at rendering 10px/pt fonts. At that size or lower, there is no room for their so-called color fringing and thus your text appears a different color than intended. Again, what's with the defaults?

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