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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

What's up with the font? It looks like a disaster on Chrome @ Windows.

All custom fonts look like a disaster on Chrome in Windows. It's the only browser that uses GDI to render text in Windows where Firefox/IE use DirectDraw. All fonts end up being rendered very thin, and if they're thin to start with, that causes discontinuities in the glyphs. It also affects the color; the rendered color may be significantly different than the text color specified in CSS.

It's been an open bug on Chromium/Chrome for several years.

Link to the bug?

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692

This is depressing. They closed the comments so they don't have to hear anything from their userbase. If this kind of problems happened in Mac, the bug would have been resolved for years.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

It's in Chromium, not sure whether it's in Canary yet.

Is there a workaround I (the user) can employ to make Windows+Chrome work right? I've long since given up on sites to figure out a workaround but would really love to have readable sites.

Use a non-custom font. You can edit the CSS using the inspector, or use an extension like Readability.

It looks like a disaster on FF as well. I don't understand why designers have been on a binge of typefaces that look like unreadable garbage.

They're running Macs or Linux and never see the garbage when they're designing their sites. The poor rendering only occurs when you use GDI to render the text which is only used by Chrome on Windows (and Firefox in Windows XP, but not Vista/7/8).

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