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I have a problem with Japanese characters inside some windows in Windows 8.1. They appear as too small and unreadable for me. The OS itself was in a different language for a long time, only just a while ago I switched to Japanese.

I did some testing and installed an English Windows 8.1 in a virtual machine, and then switched it to Japanese. Here are the results:

On the host computer: enter image description here

On the guest Windows 8: enter image description here

I looked up the strings in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes (as I've seen elsewhere) but all of them were identical. I've reinstalled the affected programs on the host machine but nothing changed.

I have of course changed all the locale settings like the default encoding, region to Japanese.

This problem occurs only with some software (like Anki and VirtualBox) but it makes some longer texts highly uncomfortable to read or unreadable.

wassup
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    Okay, I've changed the DPI setting from 100% to 125% and suprisingly the text that was unreadable now looks like in the second picture. Unfortunately, everything else is much bigger　(including the taskbar and all graphical elements), and so it is a no-no. There must be another way... – wassup Jul 28 '15 at 13:35
  • Cleared font cache - nothing. Created a new user account - nothing. – wassup Jul 28 '15 at 14:04
  • Ahh, well changing DPI on a windows system would be displaying fonts at a higher points size (scaling the text with the rest of the stuff). so it could very well be that those TTF vector drawing glyph things just do not have enough font size/height to display properly. Deep in the windows color advanced a person can adjust the systems used font sizes for the theme applied. so if it is a issue with titles menues explorer view , and programs using OS based display, it is possible bumping up the font size (metrics) for the system , then return the DPI back . Also check the cleartype smoothing. – Psycogeek Jul 29 '15 at 01:41
  • Menus, window titles, the explorer (and all Windows apps) etc. are okay. Only texts inside some windows and buttons. – wassup Jul 30 '15 at 10:25

1 Answers1

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Okay, so although I haven't found a way to fix the fonts globally, I managed to make fonts more readable at least for Anki, the program I use the most.

I downloaded this add-on: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2103013902 And modified it a little bit:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Copyright: Damien Elmes <anki@ichi2.net>
# License: GNU GPL, version 3 or later; http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

from aqt.qt import QWebSettings

def changeFont():
    ws = QWebSettings.globalSettings()
    ws.setFontSize(QWebSettings.DefaultFontSize, 12)

changeFont()

As simple as that, wow :P

wassup
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