My wife has an antique monitor - 10 years old at least, more likely 15 - which now shows 12 point and less Times New Roman characters grayed out. She has worked around it by changing her font size in Word to 14 point which displays just fine.
I downloaded a new font for her, and made sure the drivers were up to date. Didn’t help. I assumed it was a driver bug until our recent trip to our daughter’s. There she discovered that using her laptop screen made the problem go away. So, monitor problem, right?
Not quite. When she attached her laptop back to her monitor, she accidentally put it in the mode of having both her laptop screen and her monitor displaying. And that made the problem go away.
I switched it to monitor only mode - the problem returned. I switched it back - the 12 point New Roman characters were fine, on the laptop and on the monitor.
Any ideas? Besides getting a new monitor, which she doesn’t want to do?
Don’t need answer fast, since she is fine working with her laptop screen on. I’m just curious.
Here’s one thing to try:
Is this only occurring in Microsoft Word, or also in other applications that reference the actual font?
Does it behave this way for any font besides Times New Roman? (Palatino? New Century Schoolbook? Baskerville?)
I don’t tend to think of monitors as inherently cognizant of fonts; they just draw pixels where they’re told to. Fonts themselves can be corrupted, though, and so can the settings for font smoothing at certain resolutions. The latter would be my first guess. Your OS is trying to smooth the font and it making an utter hash of it.
Interesting, but ClearType was turned off, and turning it on had no effect. The problem in the link wasn’t exactly the issue. Thanks.
Doesn’t do it for most fonts, and the problem occurs with the browser also, so it isn’t just Word. I haven’t tested all fonts, but since the editor wants Times New Roman, what the effect is on the rest doesn’t matter much.
My first guess was a hardware problem with the old monitor or a driver incompatibility issue, but that doesn’t explain why turning on Display 1 also magically fixes the problem.
Somewhere in the bowel of windows there was a fix for two monitor mode that didn’t propagate to the code for one monitor mode. Or it could be in the monitor firmware, but I don’t see how that would even be aware of another monitor.
Hmm. That’s an odd problem.
One thing that happens when you hook up two displays in mirror mode is that the monitor resolution changes. It also will ignore the DPI settings for the monitor.
So maybe check the DPI settings and try changing the resolution.
If you take a screenshot, and zoom in on the screenshot, is the problem apparent? If so, can you post a sample here (ideally with text of both sizes visible)?