How-To: Trick MS Word into using Retina quality text

[Fynd]

I just found this out by mistake after fooling around trying to update my resume in the god-awful non-retina Word.

Basically, with Word open go ahead and open a >1MB .tiff file from your Documents folder on the dock using Preview. This will cause Word to go non-responsive for a split second in the background before flashing and being re-rendered using the proper retina quality fonts. This applies to the menus and all text within your documents. I can successfully reproduce this phenomenon every time.

Here are some screen grabs of Word with retina fonts:

 

[melterx12]

nice pictures

 

[Bradllez]

Please use the

 

[Rajpdx]

Very impressive. Will have to test that - but nice find and thanks for taking time out to tell everyone.

Cheers.

 

[Fynd]

Sorry about that, I updated the images. I'm pretty busy here tonight so I just used Grab and whatever default quality options to get the images up... it looks perfect in use, though, much better than the blown up/compressed images show.

Just for reference, this is using ML DP4 and the latest updated version of Office. I'm curious if this works for anyone else, as it's pretty strange.

 

[Rmafive]

I hope that microsoft at least updates word with standard support for retina quality fonts quickly. That shouldn't take them 8 months.

I will definitely try this out for now though!

 

[digitalfx]

no love on MBPr w/ ML

 

[a3vr]

No luck here with the base RMBP running Lion.

 

[calderone]

Running fs_usage of similar while this is happening may give a better idea of what is going and if it could be made permanent.

 

[mdapple]

i would be interested to see if someone else can reproduce this...

 

[Pohaku]

worked for me

thanks for the tip, I can verify that the TIFF method worked for me too!

So much better using Word with Retina now that the text is retina crisp!

Thanks again.

 

[JohnGrey]

You can just add the NSHighResolutionCapable key to Word's Info.plist and it'll make all rendered text Retina.

 

[terraphantm]

You can just add the NSHighResolutionCapable key to Word's Info.plist and it'll make all rendered text Retina.

Does this work for other Office apps?

 

[JohnGrey]

Does this work for other Office apps?

Worked on Outlook, but didn't seem to on PowerPoint.