Intro

Are you dissatisfied with Internet Explorer 9's font rendering?
Would you instead prefer your fonts be rendered without any anti-aliasing?
If so, you have the perfect download! Copying our dwrite.dll (and accompanying detoured.dll) to a program's folder gives us a chance to intercept and forward the calls to the real DWrite.dll, disabling Font Smoothing in the process.

How to turn off the blurry fonts for Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit only)

  1. Extract and copy both .DLL files to C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\ You will need administrator rights to do this.
  2. Close all instances of Internet Explorer and then re-open them.
  3. Enjoy the bliss of crisp fonts!

How to disable ClearType in HtmlHelp (the CHM viewer)

  1. Copy and rename the file C:\Windows\System32\hh.exe to a new folder, say C:\Program Files\HtmlHelp\hh2.exe
    • 64-bit users: the paths will be C:\Windows\SysWOW64\hh.exe and C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop\hh2.exe
  2. Extract and copy both files next to hh2.exe
  3. Find your favorite .chm file (any one will do), right-click on it > Open with > Choose default program...
  4. Click Browse... navigate to your shiny new hh2.exe and click Open (or double-click it).
  5. Check the checkbox next to Always use the selected program to open this kind of file
  6. Click OK
  7. Chill out with the straight lines!

How to replace DirectWrite's "ideal font rendering" effects for any other program that embeds MSHTML.dll (Google Talk, H3Viewer, etc.)

  1. Extract and copy both files to the same folder as the program executable.
  2. Start or restart the program.
  3. Smile at the lack of sub-pixel rendering!

Boring details

This is actually a port of the Anti-Aliasing Tuner for Firefox 4, minus the ability to customize the options. An upcoming release will implement the novel idea of trying to read the options from the operating system's settings and add 64-bit support.

Bug reports, feedback, etc.

Bug reports and feedback would be most appreciated! Please send an e-mail to info@softwareninjas.ca.

Updates

Go to http://www.softwareninjas.ca/dwrite-dll-wrapper to see if any updates have been released since last downloaded.