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Arvo, Puritan render poorly on Windows #44

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. View pages using the Arvo or Puritan font on any browser in Windows.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I expect the fonts to render smoothly like they do in Mac OS X, instead they 
appear jagged/aliased.

Please provide any additional information below.
Compare Bad_Windows.png with Good_Mac.png. Bad_Windows.png was sent to me by 
someone using Firefox 3.6 on what I believe to be Windows 7, but i've had 
similar results with IE8 on Windows 7 in my own testing. The fonts render 
smoothly/correctly in Google Chrome 11.0.672.2 dev, Firefox 3.6, and Safari all 
on Mac OS X 10.6.6. Why does the platform change make such a huge difference?

It seems like I may be experiencing the phenomenon described here for TypeKit: 
http://getsatisfaction.com/typekit/topics/typekit_fonts_rendering_horribly_on_wi
ndows_based_systems

Original issue reported on code.google.com by j...@dfwe.net on 20 Feb 2011 at 1:40

Attachments:

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
The problem here is that ClearType and all forms of font smoothing appear to be 
disabled entirely. I understand that's fairly common on XP systems, but my 
understanding is that you have to go out of your way to override that setting 
on Vista and Windows 7. In any case, we do not explicitly tune the hints for 
non-smoothed rendering. That said, there are a few fonts that do as well as can 
be expected in such settings, especially PT Sans and PT Serif.

it is not exactly the same issue as the link you gave, because ClearType does 
appear to be enabled in the screenshot posted there.

Original comment by r...@google.com on 23 Feb 2011 at 1:16

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
After further research, I can confirm that this is ClearType-related but there 
are still some oddities here.

I tried downloading the Arvo and Puritan fonts from FontSquirrel and hosted 
them myself using the @font-face rules in the FontSquirrel-provided stylesheet. 
Interestingly, these seem to render slightly better in Windows 7 on my test 
machine(s) than their Google Font Directory-provided equivalents. (Baselines in 
the self-hosted Puritan line up correctly on my machine regardless of whether 
ClearType is enabled; if you look at the Bad_Windows.png which is using 
Google-hosted Puritan, the b's, d's, and u's stick out below the baseline.) Why 
would the fonts look better when I host them myself - is FontSquirrel providing 
a newer version?

My research also showed that having ClearType ENABLED could also cause fonts to 
be rendered poorly in Windows, which is what spurred the development of this 
jQuery plug-in: 
http://allcreatives.net/2009/12/05/jquery-plugin-ie-font-face-cleartype-fix/ I 
confirmed this myself; disabling ClearType causes both of the demo pages linked 
from the plug-in page to render identically and correctly.

Original comment by j...@dfwe.net on 23 Feb 2011 at 1:53

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
FontSquirrel's generator regenerates the hinting using, if I recall, 
FontForge's autohinter.

Original comment by codeman38 on 23 Feb 2011 at 8:23