Anti aliasing causes text to disappear in microsoft office with 3D acceleration turned on for 17.0

[lurulf]

I upgraded to vmware workstation 17.0 Pro and also upgraded the vm hardware. Now text in microsoft office is rendered "blank", it's there, I can copy it, only it is invisible. Text renders OK for all other applications. If I turn off 3D acceleration in vmware workstation settings or disables anti aliased text under performance in system properties within the virtual machine I can see text in office.

Any one else have experienced this?

The vmware tools is 12.1.5, and my host display drivers are the latest ones for Nvidia RTX 4080.

[stardewdad]

Same!  -- text is there, you can copy paste it out of excel into notepad.  Turning off 3d acceleration returns text to visible status. 

RTX3070TI

Workstation 17.0.1 build-21139696

VMware Tools 12.1.0, build-20219665

[stardewdad]

Updated to VMware Tools - 12.1.5, build-20735119, issue remains.  No text visible, but text is there. 

[BaalLeChlorin]

If I turn off anti-aliasing the text appears, but text in office applications is "slow". It is "fast" in other applications. Could this be because office requires some special feature which is not available in the vmware display driver?

[BaalLeChlorin]

New update: In excel text is now visible WHILE I type it in, but disappears the moment I hit ENTER. When I move the active cell to a cell with invisible text it is now visible on the formula line.

[mjkrol]

lurulf,

What is your host operating system? Also, can you please collect support information (or get at least vmware.log + mksSandbox.log) and attach it?

[BaalLeChlorin]

I use vmware workstastion 17.0.1. I recently upgraded to vmware tools 12.2.0 just to see if anything changed, but it didn't.

Host OS: Windows 11 22H2 build 22624.1391 Pro (beta channel)
Guest OS: Windows 11 22H2 build 22624.1391 Enterprise (beta channel)

I upgraded to beta channel to see if there were a windows bug. The anti-aliasing problems have been there all since I joined the vmware beta program in the summer of 2022.

I believe this can be a host display driver issue, because after I upgraded the Nvidia display drivers to the latest version I am able to see the text while I'm typing into the cells in excel. But the text turns invisible after I hit ENTER.

I DO have a support contract with vmware because as a corporate customer I had to buy it together with the vmware 17 upgrade. But I have yet to understand HOW I'm supposed to use it or activate it.

[DirectorOfBats]

Having the same issue, have you been able to resolve this?

[Min-Yu]

@BaalLeChlorin 

Could you please try to reproduce this issue again with Workstation 17 and upload your vmware.log and mksSandbox.log?

I can try to take a look.

Thank you very much!

[BaalLeChlorin]

Done

[Min-Yu]

Thank you very much!

[snowfirealpha]

I'm having the same situation only in Excel - other office products seem to work fine.  Text will not show after clicking off a cell (and stays hidden even if clicking back onto the cell), but you can see the text in the formula bar.

Formatting color of a cell remains (cell is yellow), but formatted text (color, font, size, bold/italic/etc.) also disappears.

Interestingly, if you use windows "Quick Assist" it seems to use a different rendering pattern and text becomes visible again if someone is viewing your screen.

It feels like https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1001558 again.

Windows 11 guest os, Windows 11 host os, Nvidia RTX 2070 531.68 drivers
Running Workstation Pro 17.0.2 build-21581411
VMWare Tools 12.1.5

[BaalLeChlorin]

Yes, only I have followed the resolution (upgrade to 6.0.1+ of vmware workstation )

[BaalLeChlorin]

The office applications works fine if I run them in safe mode (hold ctrl while starting them). The problem is that they then become "slow", and outlook fail to load any of the company mandated plugins.....

[joserfonseca]

@snowfirealpha , could you follow these steps:

- turn off the VM

- modify the .vmx config file to have

mksReplay.enableHotkey = "TRUE"
vmx.buildType = "debug"

- power on and run the Excel application
- press (Ctrl) (Alt) (-) to start recording
- reproduce the problem
- press (Ctrl) (Alt) (-) again to stop recording

- power off the VM and undo the .vmx settings above

- provide the mks-replay.gz file  (if it's too big to attach let us know and we'll figure out an alternative way to transfer it.)

This will provide a recording of all 3D graphics commands done by the VM.  With luck we can reproduce and fix the issue by using this record alone.   In the worst case we'll at least have an idea of what could be going on, and understand the steps to reproduce it.

Please avoid passing any sensitive data by use a blank/dummy Excel spreadsheet.

[BaalLeChlorin]

(Ctrl) (Alt) (-) did only reduce the zoom level in Excel. It didn't trigger recording. I have Norwegian keyboard layout both within the VM and outside. I have also changed the vmware hotkeys to Ctrl+Shift+Alt because Ctrl+Alt is used by Visual Studio Code. If you require special keyboard settings for this to work please advise.

Anyway: Changing zoom level in Excel made the text appear when I went below 63% zoom, so this has something to do with how excel draws text. At 62% and lower the text was visible. At 63% and higher the text was invisible.

[BaalLeChlorin]

When thinking about it I believe excel draws unaliased when the fonts become small, so this do have something to do with anti-aliasing as I wrote earlier.

[BaalLeChlorin]

I did a clean reinstall of both my host and guest VM with windows 11, and text is now normal in Excel. I started the VM with the bug and excel still doesn't draw the text above 62% zoom. The old VM with the bug was upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, while the new VM without the bug was a clean Windows 11 install.

[mjkrol]

> If you require special keyboard settings for this to work please advise.

The recording start/stop hotkey is independent from your Workstation preferences. You should still use (Ctrl) (Alt) (-) even when the VMware hot key is (Ctrl) (Shift) (Alt).

When you say the hotkey did not trigger recording, do you mean you could not find "mks-replay.gz" in the VM directory? Can you please do a system-wide search for the file?

[joserfonseca]

It sounds like (Ctrl)-(Alt)-(-) hot key wasn't effective.  Make sure there was no typo when adding before mentioned settings to the VM's .vmx file:

mksReplay.enableHotkey = "TRUE"
vmx.buildType = "debug"