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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

As usual the fonts look beautiful on Mac but horrible on Windows (both using Chrome).

Yeah, you're running up against https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 (which appears to finally be closing in on a point where it can be fixed?)

I'm using Chrome 35.0.1916.153 m on Windows, and, um, there's something wrong — there's nothing wrong with the web fonts! Apart from the Merriweather Ultra-Bold that's titling De Beneficiis, that is (and a quick check at Google shows that that same font is rough in the bold weight as well). Everything else is clean and well-aliased, and that's never been the case before.

Open chrome://flags/ and activate "Enable DirectWrite". That will give you proper rendering of webfonts. (Like FF and IE on Windows.)

Here is a newer Chrome with DirectWrite enabled by default: http://i.imgur.com/yrmxzkg.png

I still prefer Firefox.

I'll just put a little note on my site instructing users of Chrome on Windows to do that :)

It has been YEARS of putting up with the horrible Google font rendering in Google's browser on Windows, all the while IE and Firefox render them perfectly.

or run the new 64-bit chrome. I could never get the DirectWrite flag to work for me. Finally I got things working via registry changes, but I undid them and installed the new 64-bit beta and it's been amazing.

_at least_ fonts presented there look stunning on Linux (using Firefox). Not sure,why they won't look great on Windows though.

The Windows font rendering system tries to aggressively fit typefaces into the pixel grid. This is a throwback to low PPI displays from back in day.

Linux's fontconfig allows for all sorts of configuration. Ubuntu, by default, probably has the nicest config. Otherwise, I personally turn off all hinting but leave subpixel rendering on. Brings it closer to what OSX does.

Personally, the best font rendering I've ever seen is on a high PPI Android phone. Most pages that are more than 2-3 paragraphs I forward to my phone for reading, since my desktop displays aren't that great.

There is also infinality fontconfig mod, which brings even more options and some sane pre-sets (it can even mimic Windows).

I seem to have the same issue with Chrome on Windows.

Chrome[1] seems to not do any anti-aliasing, as opposed to Firefox[2].

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/ZgoB9Nn.png

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/XWsEMXv.png

If you want to avoid that, do you have to stick with standard system fonts for chrome windows? Is the issue google web fonts specifically?

What you're seeing is that Chrome is using the (terrible) old Windows GDI ClearType font rendering, whereas Firefox is using the (newer, less terrible) DirectWrite font rendering. This can be enabled in Chrome by visiting chrome://flags . Specifically, what you're mostly seeing here is that ClearType does not antialias in the Y dimension, which is why you see stairstepping. (Firefox will also use GDI font rendering if it is not using Direct2D acceleration, IIRC.)

Of course, a lot of people have complained that DirectWrite rendering is "fuzzy", so to each their own I guess.

I've been starting to use webfonts and this issue has been very annoying for me (as a Linux user, where pretty much all fonts look good).

There is a windows service app called gdi++ which replaces the default renderer. I use it but sadly it won't help others visiting your own site

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