Web fonts look choppy in Firefox only - html

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.

Related

Web - Arial font is displayed differently on several devices

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.

Google Web Fonts Rendering Pix-elated on specific computer

[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/

iPad: will my book in HTML look the same on all iPads?

I am working on a beautiful book for the iPad together with an artist/designer, and we would like it to look perfect.
I am using HTML to lay out the pages, and i noticed that they look slightly different in a browser, in a simulator and on the actual iPad (the paragraphs are broken into lines a bit differently, most probably because the glyphs in the fonts are rendered a bit differently).
Can i be sure that my book will look the same on all iPads? (That is if I use HTML, and not, say, PDF). Should I supply fonts together with the app, or can I rely on the system fonts? Is it better to specify the font size in pt or cm?
UPD: I am using UIWebViews.
Thanks in advance,
Timofey.
You can never quite be 100% sure that a HTML page will look the same across all browsers on all platforms, although cross browser compatibility is generally improving with each browser version - those of us who have been doing this since the days of IE6 will remember those days with a shudder!
What helps with the iPad however is that its the same device, same screen resolution and running the same software (iOS and Safari), so if you test it on an iPad in that configuration, it will look the same on all others.
However a word of caution - you can get the Firefox browser for iPad, and all software - including iOS and Safari is subject to change and upgrades, and subject to the fact that people can also be running out of date versions if they don't plug in and sync very often.
Of course, any upgrades are not guaranteed to change the HTML rendering engine, i'm just saying its possible.
The best thing to do is ensure you keep most of your styling in CSS, so that if say, iOS 5, or iPad 3 did something unexpected down the line - you can make simple edits across the whole site/book without having to edit every page of it.
There is a CSS 3.0 feature, which allows you to specify a font for your web page elements, that is to make sure it looks the same on all browsers/operating systems, even if they don't have the same fonts installed:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-resources
http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/
Concerning other elements - it is CSS hacks again, you have to see what the differences are, and try deal with each problem individually, depending on the browser. iPad's are using a mobile version of Safari by default, but Opera also have a mobile browser for iOS devices.

Can I expect similar CSS and JavaScript behavior with Chrome 5 on Windows and Mac

Chrome 5 was recently released for Windows, Mac, and Linux, all with the same version number. Are there significant differences in behavior (CSS or JS) between the different platforms, or do they behave pretty much the same?
I'm not interested in how they handle extensions -- just handling of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The only thing to worry about are fonts, as these are (or may be) different or even unavailable on different platforms. The main problem that can arise from this is that fonts are wider or narrower than the ones for which the design was made, thus breaking some elements (for example, if the fonts are wider, certain text blocks will break onto more rows than intended, making the design look out of place; if the fonts are narrower, "gaps" might appear).
There are two solutions for this:
Use a generic font family (such as sans-serif) and while designing take into account all platforms that you wish to support;
Use #font-face, which is supported by all major browsers (except for IE) -- including Google Chrome. This way, you will be able to provide a fully consistent look across all platforms.
Other than the fonts issue, there's nothing to worry about. Both the layout engine (that takes care of HTML and CSS) and the JavaScript engine are the same across all platforms.
Useful resources for fonts:
#font-face - Mozilla Developer Center + most of the links in the See Also section of that page;
Google Font Directory - Google provides a nice API for using webfonts.

How to make text look the same in IE and Mozilla?

So, there are 2 issues here:
why does it look different (on IE it is bolder, more anti-aliased)
how do I make the Mozilla rendering look like the IE one and what impact does this solution have (I am looking for minimal changes, so solutions such as - flash, silverlight or using images are out of the question)
IE looks different because it is using "Clear Type" for rendering the fonts, even if it is not enabled system-wide in Windows. This is not something that you as a web page server can control, but rather is up to the client machine and browser.
If you want Firefox to look similar on Windows, go to Display Settings -> Appearance -> Effects -> "Use the Following Method to Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" and select "Clear Type". This should apply the same font smoothing effect to Firefox. But as I said, that's up to the end-user, not you the server of web pages.
This site gives a good comparison of font rendering on different browsers.
Not exactly a "minimal change" but certain fonts and sizes look better/more consistent than others. I couldn't say which combinations off the top of my head but I have noticed that some fonts render a lot more bold at 16px than at 15px for example. Experiment and you might find something you can live with. Alternatively try feeding a different font-weight to IE using conditional comments.
You can't unless you can convince Microsoft to use Mozilla's rendering engine, or the other way around. So unless you use your 'out of the question' solutions it ain't going to happen. Font rendering is out of the control of a web designer..
I know you mentioned Flash is out of the questions but have you considered sIFR.
It degrades nicely for non-flash browsers and look the same on supporting browsers.