improving font rendering on windows

[sk_tle]

OK so for the last few years I have been working for companies who let me choose between a mac and a pc and I worked almost exclusively on a Linux laptop. At the beginning of the month I joined a new company who is a bit more stricter in term of equipment choice and they basically provide windows or nothing. I have heard some people are using Linux but I haven't seen any official agreement allowing for this. And appart from the frustration of having to live with an ergonomically unfriendly subpar interface there is nothing blocking me in my day to day job so I have no incentive to do the renegade.

However there are 2 things that are bothering me a lot. First are the horrendous international keyboard layouts that are wrong and have never been fixed in more than 30years. This one is fixable as there are tool to convert xkb layouts to klc layouts and vice-versa, so I won't bother you with those. Second is the horrible font rendering on Windows. There are very little applications/fonts that look good, and they mostly look good when using large fonts and it looks worse and worse the smaller you set the font. It is especially annoying on a code editor. To be honest this used to be the weak point of Linux 20 years ago but it looks like microsoft has been standing still while Mac and Linux were improving the text rendering. I am not a specialist in that subject so I know very little why and it may very well be part of some resistance to change on my part. But you may want to look at those and decide which one you prefer.




Both screenshots were done using the very same monitor. I chose the same default fonts on the browser, there might be a difference in the scaling factor of the screen as the text doesn't seem to be the same size.

Anyway, any tip to improve font rendering? Are there third party tools that can improve that? I ran through the "Adjust ClearType text" wizard to set it the best I could but so far I am still seeing a difference disfavoring my professionnal laptop when putting it next to my personnal laptop running Fedora. Maybe the web is not the correct example as the css chosen might use some builtin font on windows which is not on linux, letting me fallback on a font that is better rendered? But I seem to be annoyed in other apps so I am not too sure.

Sounds weird to ask this on a cycling forum but I know there are some IT peoples around here so maybe someone has a clue.

[bcm119]

Maybe it's just the low res screenshot, but it looks like more than just the text is a little fuzzy. Which would indicate some sort of screen res scaling issue. But if it's just the text, maybe try the unchecking "smooth edges of screen fonts" box in the "appearance and performance of windows" control panel.

[Bob Ross]

I'm just amazed that you were able to do two screen shots on two separate computers and then paste them both into the same post in your web browser!

[rec head]

I've always had horrible hand writing.

[Tristan]

The second screenshot (Windows?) seems to use some comic-sans-esq font - surely this can't be the default? Almost looks as if you've got a weird scaling issue with a font that doesn't want to be scaled?

[sk_tle]

I'm just amazed that you were able to do two screen shots on two separate computers and then paste them both into the same post in your web browser!

Well I was baffled to realize during the 2020's covid confinement how difficult it seems for most people to share data. We have myriad of network protocols, cloud services, scanners and mobile photo scanning app that facilitates sharing both paper and digital data and files yet teacher and parents were taking pictures of their screen and used whatsapp to share them.

The second screenshot (Windows?) seems to use some comic-sans-esq font - surely this can't be the default? Almost looks as if you've got a weird scaling issue with a font that doesn't want to be scaled?

If you inspect that element with your browser, yes the site mention the "Comic Sans MS font" which I don't have installed on my linux laptop.