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Word 2013 a complete disaster.

protip

Member
MitchellVii, I for one am with you here.

I know exactly what you are dealing with because I have pointed out to friends and colleagues that Firefox/Aurora can render text much nicer than Chrome on Windows because Firefox can optionally use DirectWrite which leverages subpixel letter positioning and advanced kerning to yield small text that is absolutely beautiful, even on relatively low-DPI desktop monitors. I will show them side-by-side screenshots and they just say "meh." I used to have fantastic eyesight and now it's just decent, so it's not really a matter of eyesight. It's a matter of whether or not your brain is bothered by rendering quirks.

What do I mean by rendering quirks? Three examples:

1. Imbalanced stroke weight between horizontal and vertical strokes. It's very common with "hinted" small fonts displayed without subpixel rendering to have uneven visual weight between vertical and horizontal lines (or "strokes") in the letter glyphs. The reason is that without subpixel rendering, the minimum width is one pixel, but horizontal strokes tend to appear bolder. So hinted fonts often use two pixels of weight (or with cleartype, a fractional amount of weight greater than 1, but to be clear, this is not subpixel positioning) for vertical strokes. This causes odd balance that often drives my eyes/brain nuts. It's like the letters have tiny smudges all over.

2. Without subpixel positioning, characters within words will often look improperly spaced. Compared to Firefox with DirectWrite enabled, Chrome renders too much gap between many combinations of letters. Looking at the words of your message as I type this in Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, here are a few words that emphasize Chrome's inability to position characters with any precision:

anti (too much space between n and t)
at (too much space between a and t)
me! (too much space between e and !)
In Buelligan's username at the left, Chrome applies too little spacing between the B and u. They are nearly touching.

3. Lack of advanced kerning. This is especially bothersome with all-caps words. You wrote "TONS" earlier and in Chrome, the T and O are too far apart because Chrome doesn't support DirectWrite's kerning. Firefox with DirectWrite enabled will snugly fit the rightmost edge of the T into the gap left available by the O.

To be clear about something: I think Office 2013 is my favorite version of Office in some time. I love the touch UI they added and overall, the features and speed make me very happy. But I see exactly the same decrease in font rendering quality you perceive. I wouldn't go so far to call it horrible. But it's definitely a step backward, and that boggles my mind.

Judging by the response here, however, it looks like Microsoft knew they would not hear many complaints about it. :)
 
OP
mitchellvii

mitchellvii

Well-Known Member
protip,

I'm at a loss when people say they can't see how horrible the font rendering is in Office 2013 and IE 10.0 on a large screen. For me it just jumps off the screen as a pixelated distorted mess. I know I'm not crazy (well maybe a little) because there have been countless articles about this very thing written by IT professionals yet no one in this forum seems to see it.

I use gdipp (gdipp - Customizable Windows text renderers - Google Project Hosting) for font rendering in Windows in addition to Cleartype. The fonts in Firefox with Hardware Acceleration turned off are simply gorgeous. As good as anything you would see on a iPad even on a 22 inch monitor. Meanwhile Office 2013 and IE 10.0 look terrible on anything larger than my SP. I really really wanted to like Office 365 but I just can't. gdipp made fonts in IE 9.0 beautiful as well but as is their tendency to ignore things that need fixing and break things that worked, MS messed it up with 10.0.
 

IRSmurf

New Member
After careful examination on my Surface Pro and desktop with Dell U3011 2560x1600 monitor, I am unable to observe a difference. My Surface Pro has the latest Intel graphics drivers and all Windows Updates installed. My desktop is running the latest NVIDIA display drivers and has all Windows Updates installed.

My only guess is if you're using UI scaling, you may be experiencing some distortion. I couldn't see the discrepancy in your screenshots either, which greatly reinforces my belief you're experiencing a scaling issue. I turned off UI scaling on my Surface Pro. My vision is good enough to read everything at 100% scaling at 1080p on this screen and I appreciate the extra workspace.

Your screenshots would be a lot more helpful if they were saved as PNG's instead of JPG's.
 

DOS

Active Member
Word 2013 a complete disaster?

“Word 2013 a complete disaster?”

I would think that if I clicked on the Word Icon and instead of the normal splash screen appearing, a video of a mouth appeared, stuck out its tongue and went “blurble-blurble-blurble”; then crashed to a blue screen while the hard drive spun uncontrollably until the PC finally burst into flames…

Now THAT would be a “Complete Disaster”.

Seeing a few pixels on a 23 inch monitor… not so much.

Well, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong… ;)
 
OP
mitchellvii

mitchellvii

Well-Known Member
Seeing any pixelization at all when it is completely unnecessary is a complete disaster.

On my monitor, a very nice IPS panel, if I open a Word document in 100% view, the fonts are so jagged I literally cannot read them. The same document in 2007 is perfectly clear. I have no idea what you folks are seeing but based upon the scores of articles written about this problem by reputable technology reviewers I don't think I am imagining things.

Maybe they will come up with a version of gdipp that fixes this. Hope so.
 

HB_xxx

New Member
“Word 2013 a complete disaster?”

I would think that if I clicked on the Word Icon and instead of the normal splash screen appearing, a video of a mouth appeared, stuck out its tongue and went “blurble-blurble-blurble”; then crashed to a blue screen while the hard drive spun uncontrollably until the PC finally burst into flames…

Now THAT would be a “Complete Disaster”.

Seeing a few pixels on a 23 inch monitor… not so much.

Well, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong… ;)

Yes! Like the fat guy on Jurassic Park....
 
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