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Font smoothing for Windows
- Thread starter INVEST
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No, unfortunately not. The appearance of that text in Windows is by design. Apple's rendering of fonts tries to keep the appearance of the text as close as possible to the way it was designed. Microsoft's text rendering follows hinting in the font to align different parts of the font with the pixels. They don't smooth it to make it as clear as possible. Chrome is using Microsoft's API to render the text, so it will be rendered like that regardless of what you want.
Windows users can select "ClearType" for font anti-aliasing, or web developers can use CSS3 to make any TrueType font downloadable although this is not widely supported.
One of the lesser known solutions for web developers to serve a font which is major vendor cross browser compatible and allows for complete control is CUFON:
https://github.com/sorccu/cufon/wiki/About
"Cufón consists of two individual parts a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript." The whole process is described on that page. This is not a perfect solution as it is proprietary in its config and requirements, i.e. I can't wait for CSS3 to fully mature in terms of .TTF support which is well documented and easy to setup but not well supported yet. But Cufon does make for smooth and also compressed fonts cross-browser with emphasis on Windows since SCG paths are converted to VML which is natively supported on that platform. The OP here noted that as being key.
FYI
One of the lesser known solutions for web developers to serve a font which is major vendor cross browser compatible and allows for complete control is CUFON:
https://github.com/sorccu/cufon/wiki/About
"Cufón consists of two individual parts a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript." The whole process is described on that page. This is not a perfect solution as it is proprietary in its config and requirements, i.e. I can't wait for CSS3 to fully mature in terms of .TTF support which is well documented and easy to setup but not well supported yet. But Cufon does make for smooth and also compressed fonts cross-browser with emphasis on Windows since SCG paths are converted to VML which is natively supported on that platform. The OP here noted that as being key.
FYI