Font smoothing for Windows

[Dmitriy]

in firefox you can try this as well

navigate to about:config

scroll down to: gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting and double click

Thank you. I do not use Windows. But, I need for my site visitors will not spoil your eyes

 

[SilverCircle]

Hm! It very interesting. Look that does Photoshop in Windows. It, of course, not Mac but how it does smoothings?

Photoshop has its own rendering. It does not use basic OS primitives - that would not be enough for a software that must be able to produce a quality that is sufficient even for high quality print productions.

 

[Jason]

screenshots in this topic of Arial. I do not know the concept of cross-platform may affect the quality of display.

webfonts are not the solution. I tested http://www.google.com/fonts/#ChoosePlace:select in all browsers for Windows and it's ok only in IE. Safari for Windows not tested.
fallback fonts its for symbols.

Without using images, you'll never get a 100% consistent look. It's just not possible, as you have too many things working against you (most of which you have no control over), such as OS font rendering, user's who have tweaked their settings, browser font rendering, etc.

The only real solution is to use a CSS reset stylesheet and stick with truly web safe fonts for the back of stack. You've got @font-face for the front of the stack (but that only works well in modern browsers). You just have to play around with different stacks until you find something that works.

 

[RickM]

You'll never get fonts looking nice in Windows, period. There is no workaround for this. The only option is the text shadow, which does improve it slightly. That or using only websafe fonts with an @font-face font for modern browsers. I know I tried with the disney site in my footer. The fonts look perfectly fine on OS X but can look terribly pixelated in Windows. There's little to nothing I can do about it.

 

[Dragapult]

Yup, end of the day, it just comes down to how the operating systems render the fonts. I don't think fonts look bad in Windows, but they don't look nearly as good as they look in Mac OS X.

 

[RickM]

Yup, end of the day, it just comes down to how the operating systems render the fonts. I don't think fonts look bad in Windows, but they don't look nearly as good as they look in Mac OS X.

It does also seem to vary per browser. If you run my site through browsershots, on Windows, Chrome fonts are horribly pixelated. Yet on IE10 they look fine. That's using Google Web Fonts.

 

[SilverCircle]

It does also seem to vary per browser. If you run my site through browsershots, on Windows, Chrome fonts are horribly pixelated. Yet on IE10 they look fine. That's using Google Web Fonts.

That's simply the difference between ClearType and DirectWrite font rendering. DW can do proper sub-pixel placement and -antialiasing while ClearType cannot. The rendering is totally unrelated to the font even though the quality of the font itself does matter, but the rendering makes a far bigger difference here.