Question on changing ClearType Registry Settings

Question

Our users complain about WPF application blurry text rendering. Since there's no fix until WPF 4, we decide to modify ClearType Registry Settings to improve the blurry text as much as we can.

This is what I found from MSDN.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970267.aspx#registry_settings

But there's no HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics in my registry. Does that mean I need to create manually? What should <displayName> be?

Thanks. Kai

Answer 1

Creating it manually would work, but that's not the intended way for these settings to be used.  You should try running the ClearType tuner to adjust text quality for your system.

Answer 2

I tried but that didn't affect WPF text rendering. Either does that create those registry entries. That leads me to believe modifying registry may have different affect on WPF. Some people claims they managed to improve WPF text rendering by adjusting those values in registry.

So, what should be the <displayName> be if I want to create/adjust the values manually?

Thanks.

Answer 3

What OS did you try this on?  I verified that running the ClearType Tuner does set the registry keys as expected, on my machine they were set on a DISPLAY1 key under Avalon.Graphics.  It's worth noting that just changing the ClearType values is not likely to greatly improve text clarity in 3.5 SP1 and there really isn't any good work-around for it.  We've made major changes in this area in 4.0 and we recommend moving forward to that if you want to improve text quality - Beta 2 is publicly available now.

Answer 4

We are running Windows XP + SP3. I don't see HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Avalon.Graphics after running the ClearType Tuner. Although I did find Avalon.Graphics under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\. Is that the right place?

Answer 5

We are running Windows XP + SP3. I don't see HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Avalon.Graphics after running the ClearType Tuner. Although I did find Avalon.Graphics under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\. Is that the right place?

That key doesn't exist by default, you need to create it manually.

For more information, please refer to the Text Clarity in WPF whitepaper, section "Recommendations for Improving WPF Font Clarity".

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Jie
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