[robododo]

I don't think it's font scaling. It's a fundamental change to the font renderer. Basically, subpixel rendering is gone and it's all grayscale.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie10-windows_8/w...

I've not played with 8.1 yet, but hopefully it's been addressed.

[rayiner]

Subpixel rendering makes no sense on a tablet where the direction of the subpixels changes from landspace to portrait mode.

[eurleif]

Couldn't the subpixel hinting change too?

[rayiner]

You can, but the point of subpixel rendering is increasing effective resolution, and for English text, horizontal resolution is more useful than vertical resolution. See: https://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm.

[astrodust]

It's not just English text, it's virtually every written language. There are very few that use a vertical orientation, and fewer still that use only a vertical orientation.

Hebrew, Georgian and Arabic all benefit equally from sub-pixel resolution. Even vertical Chinese would be improved by having more detail on each character.