How to disable cleartype (-like blurriness) in windows versions Vista and up?

Questions about Wine on Linux
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w-user
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How to disable cleartype (-like blurriness) in windows versions Vista and up?

Post by w-user »

Even though the title suggests a rather defined question (regarding the cause), the main question is:
Why is there a clear-type blurriness in fonts (at least for some applications) when using a windows version from "Vista" up compared to "XP / 2003"? And how to disable that effect / feature?

The problem arose when testing The Bat! v9 / 10 which don't work properly with windows version set to 2003. When set to windows version 7 (but the effect starts with Vista), the fonts get blurry, just like I remember fonts behaving when cleartype was enabled on W7.
I don't know, if cleartype is a thing in wine, but that's the experience I had with windows when it comes to blurry fonts, so I use that term for now.

I looked into the documentation, but the section for fonts is rather small, and "cleartype" doesn't seem to be anywhere in there.
There are some posts in the forum, but the reg entries proposed don't seem to work (anymore?) - as others have experienced as well.

There might be a difference in how applications access fonts between windows versions 2003 vs Vista, like an equivalent of the internet explorer working in the background. That would explain why The Bat!'s editor doesn't display any characters in html mode while in windows version mode 2003, but does so with windows version mode Vista and up - but with cleartype-like blurriness. The fonts of the menus of the application are also blurry, but not so when in windows version mode 2003.

Not sure what to make of it or how to fix it.

Thanks for any hints, maybe the correct term to use in search for better results, or even a fix!
w-user
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Re: How to disable cleartype (-like blurriness) in windows versions Vista and up?

Post by w-user »

This might be a partial answer to my question (but not addressing the fact why windows versions below Vista behave differently):

Disable font smoothing in Wine
https://superuser.com/questions/1554422 ... ng-in-wine
Wine apparently respects the system's font smoothing setting, no matter what is set anywhere else. This setting is for example located in "Look and feel"→"Appearance"→"Fonts"→"Rendering"→"Details"→"Smoothing" in the settings of my system (Manjaro, Mate desktop environment).

The good news is that Wine does not update font smoothing of a program while it is running. Therefore it's possible to disable font smoothing, start the program to run with Wine and enable font smoothing again, with no effects on the rest of the system.
The bad news is that the way to do this depends on the desktop environment (and probably also distribution), so this answer can only cover very few of them.
That post is worth checking out as it provides scripts / commands for automating the proposed workaround.
w-user
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Re: How to disable cleartype (-like blurriness) in windows versions Vista and up?

Post by w-user »

Some further investigation maybe brought up a better solution:

winetricks settings list

gives the following options for "fontsmoothing":

fontsmooth=bgr Enable subpixel font smoothing for BGR LCDs
fontsmooth=disable Disable font smoothing
fontsmooth=gray Enable subpixel font smoothing
fontsmooth=rgb Enable subpixel font smoothing for RGB LCDs


->

winetricks settings fontsmooth=disable

which equates to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\FontSmoothing=0
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\FontSmoothingType=0

maybe solved the "cleartype-like blurriness" problem with The Bat! for me - or my eyes are playing tricks on me... :-)

I hope this helps some other user one day in the future.
w-user
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Re: How to disable cleartype (-like blurriness) in windows versions Vista and up?

Post by w-user »

Well, that last "solution" doesn't seem to work (at least for the The Bat! issue) after all...

It seems as if the only way (for now) is to go via the settings of Linux itself, not wine.
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