This is an accessibility request. There is no tag for “accessibility“, but essentially, I don’t have the vision I used to, and I need crisp non-smoothed fonts to use the UE5 editor, otherwise I need to take breaks often, and I’m considering switching to a different engine altogether if I can’t find a solution.
I’ve already seen the “Slate.EnanbleFontAntiAliasing 0“ command which does not work anymore on UE 5.7.2. I would rather have a simple checkbox for it in the Editor Preferences which would honestly be much better UX than having to google an undocumented flag.
I have all font smoothing disabled everywhere else Windows-wide, so it is definitely not my personal settings that are incorrect, it’s the UE5 GUI doing its own font smoothing. Please help me disable it so I can use it normally like every other app.
As explained in this post Slate UI - How can I disable anti-aliasing on fonts? - #14 by Jamie_Dale you can add these two lines either to each separate project’s editor.ini or to the global Engine\Config\BaseEditor.ini file which will affect all projects (preferable in my case).
Also, fonts not optimized for aliased rendering will look worse, so replacing all the font files with different ones in the Engine\Content\Slate\Fonts directory is a good next step.
In the end, while it’s much better than the default, the editor still tries to render fonts in different places at various multiplications of the base font size, so the jaggy/stray pixels still appear near letters and the text does not look perfect anywhere, even at fractional global application scale values. I wish there was also a way to just set all fonts to be 12px exactly, but that’s a separate issue.