Coming soon: Windows ClearType Text Tuner Integration
Kurt Catti-Schmidt (SCHMIDT)
Contact emails
Summary
Historically, Chromium/Skia has used compile-time constants for text contrast and gamma, with different values hard-coded per platform. This means that these values are not adjustable by the end user.
Windows has a ClearType Text Tuner that guides the user through various contrast and gamma values for text rendering. Native applications generally automatically pick up these values if they use a DirectWrite based text stack.
Chromium uses Skia for text rendering, and thus was not picking up these user adjustments on Windows.
Lack of support for these adjustments in Chromium-based browsers has been a long-standing user complaint:
The Microsoft Edge Team have made several changes in both Chromium and Skia to allow for dynamic values of text contrast and gamma, which is currently behind the flag "UseGammaContrastRegistrySettings" (added in https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/5031537). This behavior has been experimented with in Edge since 2021 (see https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-font-rendering-in-microsoft-edge/) and has been well-received by users.