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That seems excessive, perhaps just upgrade to a more progressive font-smoothing algorithm? ClearType is built for lo-res displays (it snaps pixels to a grid rather than smoothing), so as you'd expect it looks like utter crap on a nice monitor. I have heard good things about gditray:

http://www.cobyx.com/software/gdi/

Have to design for the lowest common denominator. Just because you and I can install gditray or whatnot doesn't mean that most people will.

Edit: The link even says that it doesn't work with Chrome, so it's still a non-starter.

Chrome should have DirectWrite rendering soon: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...

Is there an easy way to detect when type is rendered with ClearText?

This article explains and provides an implementation to do that: http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2009/11/29/how-to-detect-fo...

Most webfonts look OK on windows vista and up.