Poor rendering of non-standard fonts in Chrome on Windows

10
votes

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I can't find any canonical question / answer.

Currently, IE9 and Firefox 4+ both use different font rendering that produces (for some) more blurry fonts but overall better kerning and more consistent results. Also, it renders non-standard fonts on Windows much better. I've have not done a thorough investigation, but I think it has to do with the fact that both IE9 and Firefox use now a different graphics layer which in apparently renders fonts differently. Also, the reason some of the standard fonts such as Arial, Tahoma etc. look in Firefox the same as 10 years ago is that it actually has a list of exceptions for them (look for gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families).

So far so good. The problem is Chrome. It still uses the old font rendering that makes the non-standard fonts practically unusable. Just for illustration, the font I had in mind was: http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Play. Just open the sample in Firefox/IE9 and Chrome and you should see the difference. Is there anything I can do? Or should I look for a more optimized font.

Update: I see it's a common problem: the headings on http://www.smashingmagazine.com look very jaggy in Chrome.

Update: Sample image:

Sample image

3
windowsgoogle-chromefonts
This is still a HUGE problem Chrome has – vsync
Same question here, with BIG answers and fixes: stackoverflow.com/q/11487427/1114320 – Sliq
I have written a big article about this, including fixes: How to fix the ugly font rendering in Google Chrome. – Sliq

3 Answers

2
votes

I have read that Chrome (originally Chromium) has anti-aliasing issues that's why it's jaggy. Using font-faces also makes a difference than using local fonts in your system. So, all we can do is just wait until they fix this issue or help the Chromium Project if you can.

1
votes

Known issue. You can try gdipp or MacType.

0
votes

Copying my anwswer from Making CSS3 @font-face font rendering play nice with ClearType on Windows

A similar question here: Font-face embedded fonts look fuzzy in Windows 7 browsers got an answer that solved the same issue for me.

The fontsquirrel font generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator optimizes fonts and adds them with hinting/rendering info that helps the windows font rendering engine render them better. It also generates smaller files, which will download faster.