Comments on: Type rendering: web browsers

By: Yak

Yak — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:06:30 +0000

OSX also tends to faux bold fonts — fonts on osx look consistently heavier than windows fonts. This has caused a few issues in the past where I couldn’t use the appropriate sized font because in OSX there was a 1px gap created that didn’t exist in Windows.

By: Erik Vorhes

Erik Vorhes — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:33:01 +0000

It's absolutely essential to test type rendering in Firefox for Windows if you're using font-size-adjust in your stylesheets: it can cause trouble even with well-hinted fonts, most noticeably when your text is set in all-caps.

By: Giles

Giles — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:46:57 +0000

In our tests (with a competing web fonts service which suplied Trade Gothic) we’ve had strikingly different results in Firefox Mac as compared to Safari. As far as I was aware, FF Mac does *not* use Core Text yet; it’s mentioned here as a Gecko 1.9.3 feature: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/mozilla-developer-preview-gecko-1-9-3a1-available-for-download/

Gecko 1.9.3 should be first seen in Firefox 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_%28layout_engine%29#Usage

Perhaps I’ve got that wrong and CoreText is employed in FF 3.6. But even so, all is clearly not equal: our fonts came out much heavier set compared to Safari.

Part of our testing involved comparisons with Cufón, which came out practically identical to Safari’s rendering of the @font-face declared font. So we’re definitely assuming that Firefox has some work to do.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:02:13 +0000

Maybe interesting for you, we have statistics about how much users have cleartype enabled:
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/08/19/schriftglaettung-und-cleartype-sind-standard-webanalyse-statistik.html

By: Jeff K

Jeff K — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:15:30 +0000

As soon as you add text-shadow things change a bit. Try adding a text-shadow (text-shadow: 1px 1px 0 #ffffff) to some Century Gothic with a font-size of 21px or less. Also play with font-weight, there’s a few differences there between IE, Chrome and FF.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:16:32 +0000

“IE9 bypasses OS font smoothing settings in favor of Microsoft’s DirectWrite text rendering engine, which makes type look incredible. It also ensures that all IE9 users will see type rendered the same way. Firefox 4 will reportedly also use DirectWrite for text rendering.”

DirectWrite looks absolutely horrible. It is completely unreadable even on my very high-quality 30″ Cinema Display.

Why?

Because it makes the same mistakes that Apple’s technique does — it does not attempt to fit the text shapes into the LCD pixel grid, leaving them very blurry.

That’s not really debatable. If the font’s shape doesn’t fit into the pixel grid, it’s by default blurry.

I was using the Firefox 4 beta where DirectWrite is enabled, and had to turn it off straight away as I could not read more than 500 words without triggering a migraine.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:45:42 +0000

In reply to Anon. Type AA in Ubuntu is usually very good, it's as smooth as OSX. Depending on the font it puts more or less weight, than can matter a lot.

By: steve

steve — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:39:43 +0000

Well, it is not true that fonts on all browsers on Mac OSX look the same. For example Firefox supports more OpenType features than Safari which can heavily influence how things look.

By: Jan Rychter

Jan Rychter — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:39:32 +0000

So — when is Typekit going to provide us with a way to switch off webfonts when a) fonts aren’t hinted and b) one of the Windows rendering engines is used?

As it is now, fonts like Calluna are pretty much unusable on Windows platforms: people complain that they are ugly and unreadable. I would really like to be able to fall back to standard fonts on any platform which will render these unhinted fonts as crap.

By: Pvisop

Pvisop — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 04:52:30 +0000

IPad
Safari.

Webtoolkit render not working. Ironic for such a slick device. Spec a font/ file. Not wysiwyg