August 20, 2014

Chrome 64-bit font rendering

Google Chrome 64-bit dev came out a few weeks ago, and I quickly switched to it. Unfortunately it had a bug displaying Chinese text, so after a few days I switched back to the beta version, but then 64-bit filtered down to the beta version, so I moved back to the stable release. Unfortunately when 64-bit came to the release version, I had to figure out how to resolve it.

Luckily, after some trial-and-error, I found the setting in chrome://flags. The setting is Disable DirectWrite Windows. (Disables the use of experimental DirectWrite font rendering system.) #disable-direct-write

Before:

After:


The strange thing about this display issue is that it can display the Chinese text properly if I zoom in or zoom out. Only the standard text is affected, bold text is also not affected. I imagine something in the accelerated font rendering system accelerates the font display so much they just slip off my eyeballs. Oh, the problem also affects other similar fonts, such as Japanese and Korean.

Update (2014/09/23): As of Chrome 37, the DirectWrite font bug has been fixed. Unfortunately, enabling DirectWrite causes all the fonts in Chrome to be ugly. Sigh.