Using Georgia for body copy on a web site we've noticed major differences between how the text is rendered on a mac vs Windows.
It would appear the issue is with Windows when using smaller font sizes, since the text rendered by the browser (tested in Chrome, Safari, Firefox) looks very different to the installed font.
At 36px the text rendered by the browser (top) matches the text typed directly into PhotoShop (bottom):
At 12px the text rendered by the browser is very different (characters look elongated):
Can anyone explain why this is the case? We need to ensure consistent rendering of type across browsers/platforms.
Update
It's worth noting that if I import the system font directly (using #font-face), the type renders correctly.
If you want to ensure consistent rendering use an image, there is simply no consistent font rendering across systems. The font renderer for Windows is is very different from the font rendering in Mac OSX. Here is an elaborate article on the topic: Link
"It's worth noting that if I import the system font directly (using #font-face), the type renders correctly."
Why don't you simply import the system font directly, then?
On the other hand, I'm with Florian. The difference is minor enough I wouldn't really be concerned with it.
Related
I need to use Vegur font, which is available in otf format, for a website. However, when I try to convert it using font squirrel or any other similar font-face generator (e.g. http://fontface.codeandmore.com/) font immediately loses all smoothness and quality...
Is anyone aware of where I could get a pre-converted version of the font? Or what else could I use to convert the font.
have you checked this page with html characters rather than the one you've linked to (that has images)?
http://www.fontspace.com/arro/vegur/22551.charmap
My OS is windowsXP (using Chrome at the moment) and XP notoriously renders non default fonts with poor quality and no smoothness. On the page you've linked to, the font looks nice and smooth because is just an image, while when I check the link above, all chars render poorly... what's your OS?
I've been wondering myself why on windows my font looks smaller, and much crappier than on OSX.
Screenshot Mac VS Windows : http://screencast.com/t/UUxqLRhM
Is that because i used "em" on some rules instead of "px" ?
Thanks.
(This is from a comment, but I'll post as an answer.)
This is nothing on your end, and the culprit is different font rendering engines. Mac OS X tries to render fonts exactly as they were designed, whereas Windows tries to alter them slightly to make them more readable. The problem is, with certain fonts and sizes, it actually makes them look worse. (This article is a good read on the subject.)
If you make the font bigger, it will probably make it look better on Windows. I would venture to say that if you removed the bold font-weight, it would also look cleaner. You could also try a different font.
Overall though, all you can do is just play with different settings and see what looks good and what doesn't; the actual rendering is out of your control.
Different browsers do have different standard font-sizes. Maybo other font-types and the different way to show fonts of the OS.
100% same look is... not possible
The way MAC and PC handle fonts is different, but that is not what is happening here. You have set a font that is not web-safe, "MyHelveticaBold", and the font windows is using is clearly not the same as the one on your Mac. If you don't want to use a web-safe font then you should use open source web fonts that you can serve to the user upon visiting.
There are some CSS properties that can adjust how a font is rendered such as -webkit-font-smoothing. Read more here: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/01/26/css-properties-that-affect-type-rendering/
I'm no designer, I can't understand it, I love code and code has been my life.
For a non designer, typography is a huge 7 head serpent, and I would like to know, if there is something I can do to make my typography on the web better.
This is what I can do:
witch is nothing more than Blueprint CSS and
h1 {
font-size: 2em;
}
But I'm hating the Aliasing on the Arial font, below it's a portion of the image above at 300% zooming
From a developer side, what can I do to make my web pages look better?
I have tried font-smooth: always; but without any luck.
Font rendering varies from browser to browser and OS to OS. You can adjust the letter spacing and sizes and things like that, but there's nothing you can do, in CSS or JS code, to change how the edges are rendered or how jaggy they are.
maybe change another font? http://www.google.com/webfonts
The rendering of the font depends on how the web browser is implemented. Either the browser handles the rendering with its own implementation, or the browser uses the operating system's native text rendering.
You'll notice that the text is rendered differently on Mac OS X, Ubuntu (Linux) as well as on Windows.
Here is a collection of links about font rendering on different OS's, if you wish to know more about it:
Windows uses something they call ClearType.
Font rasterization
Comparison between different OSs
Jeff Atwood has written about this as well, here too.
You should check out these resources:
http://2011.sf.wordcamp.org/session/web-fonts-for-developers/
http://speakerdeck.com/u/maratz/p/typography-for-developers
http://aceinfowayindia.com/blog/2010/02/10-useful-typography-tools-for-designers/
I have developed a site on my MAC. The footer looks good in IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome but when I look on to a PC it appears that the font is rendering differently and pushing information into the social icons I have placed.
I am using Verdana.
The site is: foodworkscolorado.org/donate
Ideas?
Fonts are going to render differently on any system you test it on. That is life on the web... as it should be. Websites aren't supposed to look identical... they are supposed to display in a variety of formats and ways.
Since you are using a web-safe font, I suspect the issue has to do with the difference between Microsoft's "ClearType" rendering and the anti-aliasing method on a Mac.
The best you can do is test using a service such as http://www.browsershots.org and be aware of the differences.
You may be tempted to use images for your text... don't do this.
Please check this screenshot!
alt text http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/1391/difference.png
This is the same page in Linux FF (on the left) and Windows FF (on the right, also it's displayed in the same way in IEs). I love how it looks in Linux FF and want to have the same look in Windows. However after playing with all CSS properties I know of, I didn't manage to change its look in Windows. Do you by chance know any solution for this issue?
Just in case: as a webdesigner you can't control pixel per pixel how your site will display on your user's browsers. Print and PDF are great for that purpose, not the web :)
Is Cleartype activated on Windows? This changes the display a lot and it's the user decision to activate or not this feature: if he doesn't like antialiasing you'd piss him off by forcing the rendering we can see on the left!
You can also change your stack of fonts in font-family and add other fonts than Arial.
You don't get to decide how the user's fonts look. The exact choice of font and whether it is anti-aliased is a client-side setting. Some (terrible luddites, IMO) prefer the pixellated look. In any case, Linux is likely to be using a lookalike fallback font (eg. ‘Sans’) rather than Arial itself, so it's never going to look exactly the same.
To turn anti-aliasing on in Windows for most fonts (in all applications, not just web browsers), you need to enable ClearType. Without ClearType, Windows's anti-aliasing is the old broken ‘font smoothing’ option, which for most fonts is so poor that Windows prefers not to use it. ClearType rendering isn't quite the same as the anti-aliasing Linux will be using; usually it only anti-aliases in the horizontal direction. So again it won't quite look the same, but it's generally considered pretty good at least for the Latin alphabet.
If you're really desperate to push it from the server side, you could use a #font-face rule to embed a font that has the GASP table hacked to always use anti-aliasing (using a ttfgasp.exe or a font editor). However doing this to Arial (or indeed most fonts without an open licence) would not be technically legal.
You can easily get the same look (or at least similar) by activating font smoothing in Windows. You can not, however, activate it using CSS.
Font smoothing is on by default in newer versions of Windows, so a lot of visitors will see it as you see it on your Linux system.
This is a user setting, and that is as it should be. Each user should be able to choose the smoothing setting that works best for him/her on his/her monitor.
If you absolutely want the text to look like on your Linux system for every user, your only option is to make it an image.
Different versions of Windows and Linux, and even different settings of their font rendering systems, yield different results in font rendering; in the first case antialiasing with subpixel optimizations for LCDs is clearly activated, while in the second case not even antialiasing is enabled.
To get nicer looking font rendering on Windows you should enable ClearType. In any case, it's all a client-side settings, and AFAIK you can't do anything for them from HTML - and you mustn't, if the user don't like antialiasing you shouldn't mess with his settings.