Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericskiff | Hacker News Reader

I link to that article in the post, and disagree with their conclusion, but provide lots of examples for everyone to make their own judgement.

In short, my 3 arguments are that: "antialiased" is most consistent with the display in other browsers, subpixel antialiasing looks terrible on light fonts on dark backgrounds, and it's impossible to match certain thin font weights from photoshop designs while subpixel-antialiasing is on.

View on HN

You make a claim that this is specifically for Chrome on OS X, yet I don't think you've done enough homework to make such a broad statement. I am using Chrome 23.0.1271.101 on OS X 10.8 no a retina MBP, and fonts looks beautiful across the board (with no mods on my part). All those in your post look the same to me. What gives?

I first clicked on the article hoping to get an answer for the crappier font rendering in Chrome on Win32. Font rendering is one thing IE still does better than Chrome/WebKit.

   Chromium Version 20.0.1132.47 Ubuntu 12.04 (144678)

The various comparisons look the same to me as well, and seem to be clear, no obvious 'fat fuzzy' rendering. Cheap as chips Samsung NC10 netbook.

You should say "other operating systems" maybe, not "other browsers". On OS X, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all defer to the system as to whether to default to subpixel antialiasing. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 8's metro version of IE did the same. And Firefox ignores -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased, so you still can't claim consistency.

And if you're trying to be pixel perfect to Photoshop, why aren't you using PNG? Anything else isn't going to work, after all.

But if you're only arguing for white on black, well I guess. But you don't point this out, and white on black is horrid for text anyway.

On Windows, Firefox and Chrome render all columns identically. I think they're pixel-perfect replicas. http://i.imgur.com/9iaZq.png

No they are not, at least not in the image you linked. Check for example, space between a and z in Londrina's Lazy.

Hey Eric, I'm the author of the linked post. I actually do mention that light fonts on dark backgrounds look terrible on OS X and suggest using the antialiasing mode as a fix. Dark text on a light background is another story however.

> it's impossible to match certain thin font weights from photoshop designs

Why do you care how your users are choosing to view your text?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com