Editing ClearType (section)

===ClearType in DirectWrite===

As pixel densities of displays improved and more high DPI screens became available, colored subpixel rendering became less of a necessity according to Microsoft. Also Windows tablet user interfaces evolved to support vertical screen orientations where the LCD color stripes would run horizontally. The original colored ClearType subpixel rendering was tuned to work optimally with horizontal orientation LCD displays where RGB or BGR stripes run vertically. For these reasons, DirectWrite which is the next-generation text rendering API from Microsoft moved away from color-aware ClearType. The font rendering engine in [[DirectWrite]] supports a different version of ClearType with only greyscale [[anti-aliasing]],<ref>[Office 2013: Further Evidence of the Demise of ClearType? Office 2013: Further Evidence of the Demise of ClearType?]</ref> not color subpixel rendering, as demonstrated at [[Professional Developers Conference|PDC]] 2008.<ref name=DirectWrite>{{cite web|url=http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC18|title=PC18: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite|author=Kam VedBrat, Leonardo Blanco|publisher=Microsoft|date=2008-10-28}}</ref> This version is sometimes called ''Natural ClearType'' but is often referred to simply as DirectWrite rendering (with the term "ClearType" being designated to only the RGB/BGR color subpixel rendering version).<ref>{{Cite web | url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/02/13/advances-in-typography-and-text-rendering-in-windows-7.aspx | title=Archived MSDN and TechNet Blogs}}</ref> The improvements have been confirmed by independent sources, such as [[Firefox]] developers;<ref>{{Cite web | url=http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-versus-directwrite |title = Font Rendering: GDI versus DirectWrite}}</ref> they were particularly noticeable for OpenType fonts in [[Compact Font Format]] (CFF).<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/2009/10/22/better-postscript-cff-font-rendering-with-directwrite/ |title=Archived copy |access-date=2014-08-11 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140812210421/https://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/2009/10/22/better-postscript-cff-font-rendering-with-directwrite/ |archive-date=2014-08-12 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web | url=http://blog.typekit.com/2010/11/12/microsoft-directwrite-is-coming/ |title = Microsoft DirectWrite is Coming|date = 12 November 2010}}</ref>

Many Office 2013 apps including [[Word 2013]], Excel 2013, parts of Outlook 2013 stopped using ClearType and switched to this DirectWrite greyscale antialiasing. The reasons invoked are, in the words of Murray Sargent: "There is a problem with ClearType: it depends critically on the color of the background pixels. This isn’t a problem if you know a priori that those pixels are white, which is usually the case for text. But the general case involves calculating what the colors should be for an arbitrary background and that takes time. Meanwhile, Word 2013 enjoys cool animations and smooth zooming. Nothing jumps any more. Even the caret (the blinking vertical line at the text insertion point) glides from one position to the next as you type. Jerking movement just isn’t considered cool any more. Well animations and zooms have to be faster than human response times in order to appear smooth. And that rules out ClearType in animated scenarios at least with present generation hardware. And in future scenarios, screens will have sufficiently high resolution that gray-scale [[anti-aliasing]] should suffice."<ref name="Word">{{Cite web|url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2014/05/31/crisp-text-display.aspx|title=Crisp Text Display|last=Sargent|first=Murray|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150530145657/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2014/05/31/crisp-text-display.aspx|archive-date=2015-05-30}}</ref>

For the same reasons related to animation performance and vertical screen orientations where the colored RGB/BGR ClearType antialiasing would be a problem, the color-aware version of ClearType was abandoned in Metro-style apps platform of Windows 8 (and Universal Windows Platform of Windows 10).,<ref>[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=44803 Color-aware ClearType requires access to fixed background pixels, which is a problem if you don’t know what the background pixels are, or if they aren’t fixed]</ref><ref name="something"/> including the Start menu and everything not using classic Win32 APIs (GDI/GDI+).