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Today Google Chrome 37 got final and well... the fonts looking ugly. It looks unsharp like on most .NET programs. Is there a way to disable DirectWrite and get back to Chrome <= 36 font rendering?

EDIT: To show you what I mean, I took two screenshots of this website:

DirectWrite On:

enter image description here

DirectWrite Off:

enter image description here

As you can see, with DirectWrite activated the vertical lines are sometimes unsharp. Without DirectWrite the vertical lines are mostly sharp and exact on the pixels of the screen.

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  • 1
    Although, if this is in fact a HiDPI issue as alluded to in the comments, it might be worth mentioning in the question itself. On normal text scaling, everything does look much better where previously, Web fonts especially were practically unreadable.
    – BoltClock
    Aug 27, 2014 at 14:04
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    @BoltClock: No, This problem occurs on normal DPI. On another PC I use display scaling. Didn't try Chrome 37 on this PC yet.
    – Michael
    Aug 27, 2014 at 14:06
  • Noticed the change this morning and thought something was wrong with my eyes (thanks Google). The letter spacing is definitely different and I'm not liking it.
    – j08691
    Aug 27, 2014 at 15:08
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    You could always try calibrating cleartype to what suits you best instead of disabling directwrite. Search for cleartype in the control panel.
    – Eejin
    Aug 27, 2014 at 15:13
  • See superuser.com/questions/803710/…
    – DavidPostill
    Aug 28, 2014 at 7:36

1 Answer 1

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In order to disable DirectWrite.

Go to address bar and type chrome://flags/#disable-direct-write. There you will see the option to disable DirectWrite.

enter image description here

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    I disabled DirectWrite, but the fonts are still unsharp and now the letters even have an uneven distance between them. By the way, I am using 125% DPI in Windows.
    – Anderson
    Aug 27, 2014 at 12:31
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    On Chrome 37 x64, the compatibility option for disabling display scaling on high-DPI displays doesn't work anymore. I must have a larger DPI on my computer because my eyes are not so good :)
    – Anderson
    Aug 27, 2014 at 12:50
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    This is interesting, because 37 fixed the weird font issues most of us have had for YEARS. Aug 27, 2014 at 13:22
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    Thanks for that! With DirectWrite on it suddently looked like my eyes were extremely tired. VERY unpleasant.
    – Marco
    Aug 28, 2014 at 16:27
  • 1
    I hate negative boolean options. :) Oct 15, 2014 at 0:31

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