[Problem] -- I am having a problem with web fonts rendering on a specific computer, other computers in my house render the text fine (same OS and browser versions). They look really bad and pix-elated I know all about differences between how browsers render things differently but its not supposed to look this bad.
[What I've Tried] -- I tried prioritizing the .svg in my CSS first on my site to fix it on Google Chrome but it did not help. I installed Firefox and discovered it too does not render the Open Sans font correctly either. I also have tried clearing my cache (I have a cache clearing plugin) and opening in a incognito window thinking a chrome extension was causing a problem but no difference. From the screen shot it appears Chrome at least renders the larger "Open Sans Condensed" but the smaller text is pixelated. Its weird a fresh install of FF also has the same problem as Chrome. Also tried downloading the font files from Google Fonts and installing them locally, no difference.
IE 11 renders the text correctly. I need trouble shooting ideas..
The screen shot below is from the official Google Fonts website located here http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans#pairings so it should rule out any bad coding on my own page. The open sans font on fontsquirrel loads correctly and its not pix-elated.
Here is what I see and I don't think the fonts should look that pixelated... http://imgur.com/hwvupBq sorry too low rep to post images :(
Each browser loads the fonts using different formats. Usually you would use font-face with the four different types, EOT, WOFF, SVG AND TTF. You can use the Font Squirrel site to load your font and spit out the four different versions. Also, take a look at Google font embedding which takes care of the the work (although they will look slightly different in different browsers)
The problem ended up being that my Windows 7 machine did not have cleartype enabled. See this post to see how to enable it http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28790/tweak-cleartype-in-windows-7/
Related
For all of my chromium based browsers, I'm getting a very bad font within Oryx for ErgoDox. If you're not familiar with the tool, you can see my keyboard layout here.
Update: I'm seeing in "Rendered Fonts" a strange font I don't recognize. Now I'm trying to work out how this is even happening, and why it's all my chromium browsers. See bottom photo below.
Update 2: The current theory is that my system is using the first "sans-serif" font it finds because of a syntax error in ErgoDox's CSS for the font-family; "Lato" should be enclosed in single quotes ' and it is not. This is causing my system to fall back to the first sans-serif font it finds, which is normally something more useful like "Arial", but is pix PixelFJVerdana12pt in my case. I've installed both "Lato" and "LatoLatin" and it is still rendering this awful font.
Update 3: Uninstalling "pix PixelFJVerdana12pt" fixed the issue ?? Now I'm looking into that font to figure out what the heck that even is? Now it renders Lato from the web? I'm putting an updated screenshot at the bottom with it fixed.
Here's what I've discovered and tried:
The site uses "Lato,sans-serif;" for all its fonts - loaded from woff2/woff files hosted on their site.
This problem exists for all of my chromium browsers: Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge.
The site loads just fine in chromium (Chrome) for a friend of mine.
The site loads just fine for me on my mobile phone.
Extensive searching online yields no reports of anyone else having this issue.
The site displays fine in Firefox.
I've installed Lato to my machine directly from Google Fonts.
I've downloaded the woff2/woff files from ErgoDox and opened them using a woff viewer online; they display correctly there.
Reloading the site with cache disabled does not work.
There are no console, or network errors (in developer tools).
The only extensions I have installed in this instance of chromium are: 1Password, Adobe Acrobat and Application Launcher for Drive (Google).
I run Windows Defender and Malwarebytes Enterprise.
I highly suspect this issue is local to me, and not a more global issue.
Anyone else with this issue? Any suggestions?
Problem demonstration:
Weird rendered font:
After uninstalling "pix PixelFJVerdana12pt":
The solution to the problem was to uninstall the "pix PixelFJVerdana12pt" font. I have no idea what is wrong with it, but it's now working as expected.
Those of you who get your kicks out of IT troubleshooting and mysteries, this is a good one for you to try to figure out! I'd still love to understand why this was happening - so strange.
I think I've figured it out and fixed it on my system - the font pix PixelFJVerdana12pt/PixelFJVerdana12pt by Flashjunior.ch has a TTF UniqueID of 0, which must cause Windows's font handling to treat it differently. I changed this to the font's name in FontForge, and replaced it on my system - after a restart of Chrome, the fonts in Oryx and gameatlas.com seem to be how they were intended to look.
I am using this great font from Fontsquirrel, Munro. (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/munro)
I wanted to use this font in a webpage of mine. I've put the .ttf file in a map named 'fonts' and referred to it in CSS.
nav a{
background:#9cf2e6;
display:inline-block;
color:#0;
text-decoration:none;
font-size:15px;
font-family:'Munro';
margin:13px 3%;
padding:7px 2%;
}
Then I noticed something. The O's in my webpage are filled. As you can see it shouldn't do this, because it did not do so in Photoshop or the webpage from Fontsquirrel. Also I tried to modify the font in Glyphs but there seems to be nothing wrong with it there.
My question: how will I undo the filled letters in this font? Is this a problem because it ain't a webfont from Typekit or Google fonts?
Thank you so much for all the help I can get.
I'm unable to reproduce this on Windows 7 (Chrome, Firefox, IE) with Munro installed locally. The letters display just fine (see image below). And I think that's the bigger issue: fonts not made for the web are likely to be rendered very differently across browsers and platforms (if at all). If you want to make sure these buttons look the same for all your users, stick to the images you created with Photoshop (and perhaps save them as PNG-8 with transparency rather than PNG-24 to shave off some kilobytes).
Technically, you can turn any TTF file into a web font, using FontSquirrel's Webfont Generator, for example. The font's license has to allow this, of course, because you'd essentially be redistributing the font. Just placing the TTF file in a /fonts/ folder and using font-family: Munro;, however, is not going to cut it, and only works for you because you have previously installed the font on your computer.
If I have, say, the Ubuntu font installed on my computer and I visit a webpage that references it in its stylesheet, my browser will not bother downloading it from the webserver, but instead loads it from my hard drive (or memory), which saves bandwidth and is much faster. I've also found that having a font installed locally can actually make it render differently than when it's loaded as a web font (e.g. WOFF).
So yes, it probably is a problem because this particular font is not very web-friendly, but even with web-friendly fonts, like those available through TypeKit or Google Fonts, you can still run into rendering differences (most noticeably between Windows and Mac). While it may be a fun exercise to try and recreate the images using just CSS, you're probably better off saving these buttons as images, or using a font that is web-friendly. Something from the Monospace category in Google Fonts, perhaps?
http://i.stack.imgur.com/9SuMr.png (Windows 7, Chrome)
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 am using two Google Web Fonts at my website. They are Roboto Slab and Fauna One. They look good in latest Mozilla Firefox and IE10 but for some reason they look horrible in Google Chrome.
They are linked to my website as follows:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto+Slab:400,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Fauna+One' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
It took me a while to realize that Google Chrome has a problem with web fonts and that it renders them poorly. I am wondering if there is solution for this?
What if I download those two font types and embed them into the main directory of my website and then call them through CSS via #font-face property? Would Google Chrome in that case render those fonts nicely or I would still have the same problem and poorly rendered fonts???
Or there is some other solution for this issue?
Thank you all!
I believe I saw some bug report for Chrome where it was mentioned that this will be fixed - but I'm not 100% sure. I believe that it's not actually 100% the fault of Chrome...
My understanding is that the problem is to do with the order in which font types are presented in the #font-face directive. So, Chrome handles more than one type but not all types will render at equal quality. Apparently, Google actually doesn't serve the fonts in the right order from fonts.google.com - somehow...
In the end I found that, with Roboto at least (which I'm also using on a project), it is available for use on Font Squirrel (and open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license) - so you can download it here: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/roboto (download the Webfont Kit for full cross-browser font support) - you lose the CDN goodness of having it hosted on Google's servers if you use it from your own web server but, IMHO, I'd rather lose a few milliseconds than have to deal with such terribly rendered text...
I can't help you with Fauna One, unfortunately - it doesn't appear to be listed on Font Squirrel - perhaps you can find it on another font site? Or another similar font which is available on font squirrel?
From a web browser perspective (Chrome being the browser in question), Chrome 35 in Windows has difficulty rendering some fonts, like Roboto, without some horrible artifacts that make the font difficult to read.
There is a feature called DirectWrite that will be included by default in future versions of Chrome that will fix this problem. You can enable it now in Chrome 35 by going to chrome://flags in your browser URL bar. You can Enable DirectWrite (experimental in Chrome 35), close your browser, open and try again.
Just to be clear, I discovered this problem on Chrome 35 for Windows. DirectWrite is a DirectX API for rendering fonts in Windows. Chrome by default uses Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) which seems to be the problem.
See this article