Chrome's text rendering
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Last week, I got updated to the latest and greatest release of Chrome: release 35. Among one of the improvements is the use of DirectWrite on any modern Windows operating system, which greatly increases the quality of rendered text compared to GDI. Letters are more crisp and clear as they are in IE9+, which can especially be seen with FontAwesome.
However, for some reason Chrome sometimes starts to lose some letters. It starts very subtly, on a single page some capital letters are missing or letters in words are misplaced. However, it quickly gets out of hand and results in this:
The only solution is to exit Chrome completely, and then restart it.
Good job!
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h h h h hh o
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But seriously, I'm on 35.0.1916.114 m on Windows 8, and I still get ye bog standard single-axis cleartype. Is there something I need to enable?
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That's the exact same version I'm on. Try this:
- Go to chrome://flags/
- Search for "Enable DirectWrite"
- Click "Enable" and restart your browser
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agree with @AlexMedia
I bet it is somewhat related.
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However, for some reason Chrome sometimes starts to lose some letters. It starts very subtly, on a single page some capital letters are missing or letters in words are misplaced. However, it quickly gets out of hand and results in this:
OMG yes me too, I experienced this bug and had to turn that setting off. So sad because Chrome's font rendering is awful on Windows, and this new experimental flag in Chrome 35 is the first time in years (literally! years!) they've dealt with it.
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Check your Video BIOS.
Seriously though, it can only be enabled via chrome://flags, right? So it's an experimental feature, no wonder it breaks.
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I just flipped it back on after seeing the same bug @AlexMedia reported, and it's been stable for me for a few hours now. I might have installed a new Radeon video driver since I tried it last, as I had to do that for Wolfenstein.
So nice to have non-hideous font rendering.
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Check your Video BIOS.
Seriously though, it can only be enabled via chrome://flags, right? So it's an experimental feature, no wonder it breaks.
If it can break, don't let users enable it. And not getting text rendering right in a browser, how incompetent is that? Next thing you know, they not longer know how to support jpg.
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If it can break, don't let users enable it.
Right. And let's also prevent them from disabling javascript because that will break sites.
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Check your Video BIOS.
I've seen it happen on a few machines, with graphic cards from different vendors (nVidia, Intel) so I'm not sure if it is an issue with the gfx card. I've never seen it happen in IE either, so I guess it's a bug in Chrome's implementation.
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If it can break, don't let users enable it.
That pretty much excludes anyone from putting out any experimental functionality or alpha/beta release. And those are generally considered good practiceAnd not getting text rendering right in a browser, how incompetent is that?
They have a perfectly working text rending engine now. They're adding a new experimental one that should provide better quality but apparently still has major bugs (hence the experimental). How is that incompetent?...
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That pretty much excludes anyone from putting out any experimental functionality or alpha/beta release. And those are generally considered good practice
You really can't release experimental features to the public at large. If it's bug reports you're after, there's no way you'll be able to deal with the quantity; if you don't want the bug reports, don't release. And Chrome 35 isn't an alpha release. It's stable as of May, 20.They have a perfectly working text rending engine now. They're adding a new experimental one that should provide better quality but apparently still has major bugs (hence the experimental). How is that incompetent?...
Because they could have tested it a bit before releasing? It's not as if it's a two man project.
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Ugh..
There is a difference between releasing a feature and allowing power users the ability to turn in-development beta features on to get a taste of what's to come (and to help find bugs exactly like this text rendering one).