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Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit, 1920X1080 screen and I have noticed that when I do a screen sharing session Webex, eLuminate, or Bomgar, my font changes to something 'thinner'. RDP does not seem to cause this.

Normally at the end of the session it reverts back to the normal font. Just this time, after a Bomgar session it did not revert.

I never bothered looking into what could cause, since it always reverts, but now this is odd.

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2 Answers 2

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It seems that Webex turns off Microsoft ClearType.

So turning it on again in the Display Settings of Windows will solve the problem.

Windows 7:

Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Display > Adjust ClearType text > Turn on ClearType > Next > Next > Next > Next

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    Thank you! I could see a difference, it was subtle, but could not put the change into words! Your explanation makes great sense!
    – geoffc
    Apr 18, 2014 at 0:12
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NB: this isn't an "answer", rather some rationalising about why it is - which I hope people searching for answers will find useful / interesting.

I used to think this was to just done to improve image compression.

However it dawned on me that ClearType would be disabled for another important reason: it's dependent on the specific LCD screen. If a viewer has a different order of the Red Green and Blue sub-pixels than the presenter, then they might see horrible visual artefacts.

But then, wouldn't it be better if Web Ex could degrade from ClearType to standard Anti-aliasing and not dropping to horrible "jagged" text?

Note that webex has this option:

[Meeting > Options ... > Content sharing] 

    (o) Better imaging (no image compression)

If that's really no image compression, then using Anti Aliased fonts would not make any difference. However I wonder if they've just tried to dumb-down the language for users, and what that really means is that they do some quick lossless compression (like run-length encoding).

Still, I would have thought if you pick this option, you'd at least want smooth fonts - surely that falls under the "Better imaging".

But good luck getting feedback or info from Cisco about why this is so. Perhaps someone with a paid support contract could file an enhancement request, to benefit the rest of us. :-)

So I guess the workaround by RaGE seems to be the only option. (Albeit annoying when you just want a quick WebEx.) Most modern LCDs do use the same layout, so if no-one complains about the quality then there's probably no problem.

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  • Footnote: actually even people with the same LCD pixel layout may see such artefacts from ClearType's "tricks with colors" when the view is rescaled - although with downscaling the blurring of the scaling tends to diminish those. The artefacts would be very noticeable with up-scaling (zooming larger), however.
    – Luke Usherwood
    May 8, 2018 at 9:56

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