A Tip Regarding Those Portable Double Monitors That Can Be Run Through A Single USB-C/Thunderbolt Connection - It Turns Out They Have A Strange Little Quirk Which Can Make Them Unusable

[George Lucas]

Mount your LCD screens in the right orientation Cheng.

Aww yes let me just mount my giant fucking TV upside down. And before you mouth off again, my TV is Japanese.

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

As of Windows 10 1903, pages 3-5 of Windows' built-in ClearType tuner have no effect on text rendering. Therefore, these settings were omitted from this program. This program assigns sane default values to the affected registry keys so that if they begin working again in the future, ... they will at least have sane values.

I can verify this. If you check the registry values for ClearType, which you can find at Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\ in the registry before running the tuner, and after, they remain the same. The only time time it changes is if you select the last option present consistently, then it cranks the ClearType up like no tomorrow and text looks really stupid.

A quick search claims you can use something called BetterClearTypeTuner to choose BGR subpixel aliasing for text rendering, no idea how well it could work or if it could be split for each display.

BetterClearTypeTuner unfortunately doesn't allow for monitor level subpixel rendering selection, you can select RGB, BGR, or Grayscale, but it will impact all monitors in a global fashion not just a given monitor.

But, BetterClearTypeTuner is how you can tell if you are dealing with a flipped panel. If you switch the rendering to BGR and the stupid panel suddenly looks correct, and the panel that was working suddenly looks stupid, then you will know for a fact that the stupid panel is flipped. If it wasn't flipped setting global subpixel rendering to BGR would have no impact, or just make things worse for the stupid panel.

As I said above, you can define per monitor subpixel rendering for ClearType. In Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\ for each display you connect you can manually edit the registry to assign per-monitor subpixel rendering direction under the "PixelStructure" entry for a given monitor, 1 = RGB, 2 = BGR, 0 = Grayscale.

The number for the monitor is the one assigned that you can see in the Display setting for virtual monitor arrangement when more than one monitor is attached to the system. You can also pull up the number assigned to the monitor using "Identify" in Display settings. The number of the monitor will stay on the screen in the lower lefthand corner after clicking "Identify" for a few seconds.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, the per monitor subpixel rendering setting is not respected by some applications, such as the accelerated rendering and compositing engine in Chrome, and any application that uses GDI+ for rendering, such as Notepad, and other basic Windows programs.