On my website, for some reason the Arial font is displayed differently on several devices.
It was fine and the complaints started to arrive approximately a month ago and I suspect that the root cause is somewhere locally (browser or OS).
All the problematic users sit on different versions of Windows and mostly use Chrome (but no everyone).
Tried to investigate this issue but did not find something in common.
Is anybody faced such a problem already?
Code:
<h1 style="font-family: Arial;">Title</h1>
I suggest you to put your fonts file in your website directory and set path from your directory.
(some times maybe that device has not your font.)
in top of your css file:
#font-face {
font-family: "BYekan";
src: url("../font/BYekan.eot?#") format("eot"), url("../font/BYekan.woff") format("woff"), url("../font/BYekan.ttf") format("truetype");
}
use it:
body{
font-family: "BYekan";
}
Yes, there is a reason for this. There's nothing to state that any given device, or browser for that matter, must adhere to any given standard for the rendering of fonts. Consequently, it's prudent to create overall website designs with the assumption that text will render inconsistently across browsers/devices. As soon as you assume rendered text will "fit in to this/that space" you're in trouble.
Instead create a design that deals with the issue of font rendering elegantly.
This should not be surprising, and what you call the "root problem" is actually not a problem, but simply how fonts work in the browser.
Without an explicit #font-face rule and real font sources, you're telling the browser that you don't really care what it loads, as long as the font that gets loaded matches, roughly, what you're asking for. If you ask for "Arial" then the browser will ask the OS for a font that claims to be in the Arial family, and different devices may (or rather, will) have different versions of Arial installed. So your content's going to look different for different devices.
However, and something a lot of people forget, it doesn't matter if that's the case. What matters is that your site content looks consistent. People are not going to look at your site on two computers at the same time and then notice that they don't look pixel-identical. Individual users are going to look at your content on one device at a time. So: is the look consistent on a single device? Great, you're done. Which version of Arial is actually being used is pretty much irrelevant in that case.
Related
I'm trying to build a web page and need some kind of fairly distinct cursive font (not too crazy, but still distinguishable from standard print). However, when I look at this page in Firefox: https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/fonts.en.html
My browser renders all of them in an approximately standard font--none of them look nearly cursive enough. Since this is just an out-of-the-box installation of Firefox, I imagine this is how it will render on most users' screen if they're using the same.
Is there any way to force render a more cursive font for someone using standard Firefox?
As was mentioned earlier, the font in that example varies depending on device, not browser.
When you set a non-specific font-family in your stylesheets, e.g. font-family:sans-serif; or font-family:cursive; what font that actually gets used will depend entirely on that visitors operating system and what fonts are installed there.
In that link it shows you various system fonts that may or may not be installed, with system defaults as a fallback, with a picture next to each showing what it should look like if your system has that font. This will differ from person to person. It gets quite complicated when you consider that sometimes the fallback fonts can even vary between OS versions.
So for more complete control, many developers turn to webfonts. I use a lot of Google fonts for my websites; https://fonts.google.com/
There are different ways of using a webfont, but I find this way simplest;
/*put imports at the top of your stylesheet*/
#import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lobster&display=swap');
h2 {font-family:"Lobster", cursive;}
<h2>I'm A Webfont</h2>
I have a website, which is a internet forum, and in my forum posts, I have the following font:
font-family: 'Segoe UI',Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
Now, here's how it looks like in different browsers: (from left: chrome, firefox, IE)
As you can see, chrome is displaying whole different font than the other two. Why? How do I fix that (I want this font to look like the other two)? Also, this is the link to the page I made screenshot of: https://scyk.pl/Forums/Thread/Na%20luzie/8 (look at the post contents)
What is happening is that Google Chrome most likely does not have that font, and is using the fall back fonts instead. To make sure this doesn't happen, you can explicitly load the font using
#font-face
in CSS3, which allows you to explicitly load the fonts by referencing it. You can learn more about using #font-face HERE, where you use src: and get the url of whatever font you are using.
If the font is not that important, however, I recommend not worrying about it and just letting Chrome use the fallback fonts instead.
To do #font-face, the code would be:
#font-face {
font-family:Segoe UI;
src:url(https://github.com/shawnphoffman/shawnphoffman.com/blob/master/Content/fonts/segoe-ui-semilight.woff);
}
You may have to go to the github link and download the raw version of the font, then reference it there.
You have several options but I think you'll find all of them unsatisfactory:
Render the page into an image on the server and send that to the client.
Get the source code for Chrome and replace the font rendering engine with the one used by Firefox.
Oh, btw, it will also look different on Safari (probably a lot different to the other three; Safari is a very sophisticated browser and it will try it's utmost to make a page look good; driving web designers insane in the process is a small price to pay for beauty ;-)).
Rendering text is something that you only have limited control over. Maybe Chrome doesn't find Segoe UI, maybe the font rendering engine can't use the hinting of your font. While not ideal, I suggest not to spend too much time on it.
OS: Win 7 64bit
Browser: FF 24.0
If I go to http://www.google.com/fonts it looks awful:
And when I load one for my site locally it looks equally as bad but here is my configuration that I generated from fontsquirrel below:
#font-face {
font-family: 'SecretSans';
src: url('<%=domain_url%>/fonts/secretsansextralight-webfont.eot');
src: url('<%=domain_url%>/fonts/secretsansextralight-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
url('<%=domain_url%>/fonts/secretsansextralight-webfont.svg#secretsansttextralight') format('svg'),
url('<%=domain_url%>/fonts/secretsansextralight-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
url('<%=domain_url%>/fonts/secretsansextralight-webfont.ttf') format('truetype');
font-weight: 400;
font-style: normal;
}
Because it looks just as bad on the site above and my own site I presume it's an issue with Firefox and/or Windows.
Is there a fix/configuration that will work for all users hitting my site that doesn't require them changing any settings within Firefox or Windows as that's obviously unrealistic.
EDIT1: I just went to Control Panel > Fonts > Adjust ClearType text and now it renders properly in Firefox... I can't ask users to do this though so I'm hoping there is another way
I know this thread is from the stoneage, but unfortunately the problem is still current. And if you google for the choppy fonts problem, it's in the top 10; so I want to add my 10 Cents of experience with it!
Ok: If you search Google for problem with fonts under Vista/Win 7/Win 8, you find two major groups of problems that are both related to ClearType in many cases. Not all! But many.
Group 1: Blurry Windows fonts
If we talk of "Windows fonts" we are talking of the user interface (menus and such), and the "workspace" of office apps like Word or Excel.
This problem hits almost all people that do not have a 16:9 widescreen monitor that is HD capable, esp. classic office-type monitors of 19" and 1280x1024 resolution. The keyword is "Low-DPI" here.
For those who don't know: ClearType does a HORRIBLE job on these Low-DPI monitors and renders the whole interface in such a blurry way that trying to work with it causes massive eye strain and headache. Really folks, it gives you eye cancer!
(and no, you can not recreate that prob' on a Full-HD monitor!)
The only way out is to disable ClearType. This helped almost everybody of group 1 - including me.
Group 2: Choppy font rendering in Firefox and Chrome (rarely MSIE)
In many, many cases - like in this thread - ClearType was disabled. And when re-enabled, the browsers do render fonts just fine. True for me, too!
Unfortunately... when I re-enable ClearType, I'm back in group 1!!!
So: EITHER I have ClearType disabled and can work with a sharp and clear Windows for hours without fatigue of my eyes - but then I have to live with choppy webfonts in FF and Chrome.
OR I re-enable ClearType to see the nice and nifty fonts the designers have chosen for their oh-so-stylish websites - and live with the headache Windows gives me due to the blurry fonts! :-(
Obviously, I'm going the first way.
And if I stumble about a website where fonts look like broken, I simply toggle the usage of webfonts with just one mouse click - there's a great FF-AddOn for that.
Oh, I forgot: Why seems MSIE to render the fonts nicely?
Well, IE (at least 10 and 11 to my knowledge) always uses ClearType to render a page - no matter if disabled in the system settings or not.
Of course, it then also shows the blurry fonts problem - and makes me remember why I have ClearType disabled. And will let it so!
Final thoughts:
Programmers believe webfonts to be the final solution to all of their design-needs, thinking, they have everything under control by testing their stuff on a couple of default systems. In fact, webfonts just made a well-known problem freak out of any control - because there is no such thing like a default user!
Think about it.
I am pretty sure it is just how the browser renders it. Especially with #font-face stuff (I am assuming you used http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ or a similar site to generate it). You can use a little bit of text shadow to make it a little bit crisper, but from what you have shown, I think you might be better off trying to find another very similar font that will render better.
This was obviously because you had ClearType switched off. It's the method used to smooth the edges of fonts on computer screens (LCD). It has nothing to do with the method used in the webpage to attach them, this is strictly a font rendering issue. Fonts may appear differently depending on the system, as each has a slightly different method of rendering them - they tend to look best on Apple systems, while Windows seems to have a somehow inferior rendering method. This is entirely up to the system that is running, so the fonts will render differently for various users. Also, professional fonts from big foundries generally render much, much better than free, open fonts, because they're specifically corrected to optimize how they're rendered on screen, especially when they're rendered small (below 20px size), so the roughness of fonts from the Google Fonts set might also in part be due to the fact they're not as carefully crafted as those professional, expensive ones. Nevertheless, regardless of the font quality, text will always look uglier and choppy if font smoothing is switched off (or not supported), so there is nothing you can do. Stopping yourself from using custom webfonts because you're worried about the fraction of users who have font smoothing turned off is will stop you from using them at all.
I've read that OSX and Windows have two very different algorithms for rendering fonts. As such, it's a common issue that web fonts look "heavier" when viewing them in OSX than they do in Windows.
For example, this is the same font, on the same site, in the same browser, but on different operating systems:
Here's Arial exhibiting similar differences:
Is there any way of altering the rendering of fonts in either Windows or OSX so they look closer to each other? Or is there some other technique to deal with this difference?
That font is a particularly bad example, I deal with a lot of fonts and have never seen one look like that. Keep in mind that people are used to seeing their fonts rendered a certain way on their own machines, and thus it is not your job to dictate how fonts should be rendered.
A few things to keep in mind are to only use weights you've included, for example, do not use font-weight: bold on a custom font-face if you haven't actually included the bold version of that font. "Browser bold" always looks messed up compared to the actual bold font.
Also, for some fonts, I find that I need to change the font-smoothing property for webkit browsers, as the default (subpixel-aliased) can look a little heavy. You can add this property to any element that uses the problematic font (even the body, if required).
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
I've been displaying Chinese fonts on my Chrome browser on my Mac and I liked it. However the font is rendered differently in Firefox or when I use Chrome on Windows. Is there a way to standardize the font that the browser chooses for Chinese characters?
You have various options:
As Art of FITZ says, specify an #font-face and have the font downloaded to the user (which will, indeed, take up a lot of bandwidth if the font is large)
As Jukka says, provide a list of font names in the font property and hope one of these is installed on the user's computer
The legacy method: render the text on your own computer in the font of your choice, upload this as an image file. If you don't have much text to display, this may be even more efficient than having an #font-face clause that downloads a multi-megabyte font file.
Tailor the #font-face to your needs: Depending on the amount of text to display, you may be able to create a font with only the subset of characters you need (with an online utility such as Font Squirrel), reducing the size of the font file to download.
Here is a quick reference to how this line of code is used.
http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/
Different browsers have different default fonts, but can can override this by setting font-family in CSS. Just remember that different computers have different sets of fonts available, so you should normally use a list of fonts, hopefully covering most browsing situations.
Maybe you have done so but see different results on different browsers. Please post a relevant part of the code and/or a URL then.