Blurry or spotty text in forms, but not anywhere else

While I know this isn't a tech support forum, I've found the people (and impez) of Doomworld to be quite knowledgeable.

I have Windows 7 and recently with an update, the text in forms is just blurry or spotty in Firefox. Not just in Firefox, but in other programs as well. More than just browsers. I can put up with it in the browser, but when I'm programming in a different program its much worse.

So here you have normal text:



And now you see what's in the form:



Everything I look up on Google finds something else.

Does anyone know what's going wrong?

btw... impez impez impez barons of hell rocket launcher to the face of caco demons!

Perhaps the ClearType settings are all jacked up.

Control Panel > Fonts > ClearType

I've been messing around with the font DPI. I turned off XP style DPI scaling and that did nothing.

It looks like Cleartype is the issue for sure.

I can't find the setting for that even in Control Panel > Fonts. Turns out I have Windows Vista on the laptop with this problem. My bad.

I found it and I've gotta say turning on cleartype did nothing. Turning it back to standard makes it more readable in the form... wanna know the catch? Everything else becomes almost unreadable. Hilarious.

Maybe I need to turn on the Windows XP DPI scaling again.

Well I think that I figured it out. Courier New is the problem. The font itself. Courier New is the monospace font default for every program it seems including forms in web browsers and programs that I program in.

I tried several sizes of the font and they all look awful. Some sizes have Ts don't even have the dash, so they look like l. If I have it at size 24 then it looks perfect! I don't want to read 24 size text though.

In fact opening up the Courier New to look at the different sizes just doesn't look right. The large sizes look correct. Its just the small sizes are missing horizontal lines.

So now I've gone to download the font and its not the font, its my screen showing the font. Courier is even worse!


Now I'm using Arial as my monospace font and its working perfectly, but its small. Time to use Luciana or whatever its called big font!

Take a look

Someone can post hell this now.

The impez will suffer.

ClearType wouldn't affect the horizontal lines. Its only effect is effectively triple the horizontal resolution of fonts by treating the red, green, and blue elements of each pixel as though they were separate pixels. It works very nicely on b/w text.

Anyway, since we know that's not the problem, is your scree resolution the same as the size of your display? That was the #1 cause of late 90s font weirdness with laptops iirc.

Aliotroph? said:

ClearType wouldn't affect the horizontal lines. Its only effect is effectively triple the horizontal resolution of fonts by treating the red, green, and blue elements of each pixel as though they were separate pixels. It works very nicely on b/w text.

Anyway, since we know that's not the problem, is your scree resolution the same as the size of your display? That was the #1 cause of late 90s font weirdness with laptops iirc.

I tried shifting my screen resolution to every possibility. I neglected to post that. Right now its at 1366 x 768 and its always been to my knowledge. I went to a specific tech forum and as usual the Doom forum has been more helpful :-)

I had the same problem, I think, when I didn't use the native resolution.

geo said:

I tried shifting my screen resolution to every possibility. I neglected to post that. Right now its at 1366 x 768 and its always been to my knowledge. I went to a specific tech forum and as usual the Doom forum has been more helpful :-)

I had the same problem, monitors of this size (of the grand total of 2 I've used) seem to default at 1360 x 768 instead of 1366 x 768. Changing it fixed the clarity problems for me, along with turning on ClearType. (must have turned off when I switched displays a while back.)

Nope, that didn't work. Still the same. I think it might need to be taller since its the horizontal lines that seem to not show. However, even changing to a 4:3 ratio doesn't even help. ClearType is on.

Can you post the model info for your display or laptop if it's one of those?

We need to see what the native resolution of the display is. If it's wrong then perhaps your drivers don't want to display the correct resolution. That usually happens if you don't have correct drivers (eg. the default VGA driver), but it sounds like a bad update could plausibily do it too.

How do I find native resolution? It doesn't seem to be in Vista's resolution settings like its in Windows 7.



As for the stats and model.

What model of laptop do you have?