Having trouble finding a way to get the textures to not look unreadable. Attached is a pic of the main menu for Doom 3. Is there something in the config I'm missing?

Never encountered this issue myself but it might help others figure out the cause if you post what hardware and OS you're running the game on.

Im running windows 10, my PC is 64-bit, with an Intel HD Graphics (Core i5) processor. It's not the most amazing computer so I usually only use it for classic DOS games and anything else that is well optimised. I figured it was just the game detecting that my PC is crap so it turned the graphics settings so low that the text is barely legible. But at the same time no other game has done this to me, so it's only Doom 3 having issues, Doom and Doom II work perfectly unsurprisingly.

I wonder if you would still have the issues if you tried to run it through the RBDOOM-3-BFG source port. Maybe an option to help rule out if it might be the retail version of the game that's just not cooperating with your system for some bizarre reason.

I remember seeing such distorted text in the past. AFAIR trial and error method solved the issue. We tried about half of the dozen of driver combinations. And some specific version of the video drivers gave a good result then. Not the latest one, though. But that was nVidia, not Intel.

I think that one gave me OpenGL errors but I might be talking about something else. Is there no way to edit the config and force it to load higher quality textures?

There might be but I'm not the person to ask unfortunately as I have no idea on what each specific setting would do if you were to change any of them.