More like the dark side of crappy Windows font rendering.

More like bad redesign in the first place :) They’ve lost their soul.

its face

Windows XP does have antialiasing set by default - my guess is that they used a TrueType font without a correctly set "gasp" table.

Understood about Windows XP anti-aliasing (which is why I was asking you about it the other day), but it also looks like this was an OpenType CFF font, so the OS version differences and default settings are even less relevant. The article about this has a lot of errors. My lengthy thoughts are here:

http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/10/boing-boing-web-fonts/

Cheers,

T

Ah, makes sense. Didn't relaize this was the same case.

Cheers, Si

PS link seems to be http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/10/boing-boing-redesign-uncovers-web-f...

thanks for the correct link.

The original article is dead on. All fonts work straight away for text on all Mac OSX unless the user has turned off quartz rendering at an unusually high size. If they have, the user themselves can change the setting and the fonts will look better. All fonts look like ass on all Windows unless expensive and time-consuming work is performed on them, or the user has much more resolution than normal. Since the web is resolution independent, the work must be done... or ass. After this expensive and time-consuming work is done, some Windows type still looks like ass, but it's clean ass and people will get used to it, because they are Windows users.

The only difference between us and Boing-Boing, is that we do not count on antialiasing alone to solve this problem, but we are a very very small minority of developers.

>my guess is that they used a TrueType font without a correctly set “gasp” table.

Have you, yourself... actually tested this with all versions of IE? :-o.

Cheers!

>Have you, yourself... actually tested this with all versions of IE? :-o.

Did you read the article? It wasn't talking about IE...

"The problem is that while modern browsers, like the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome, all support @font-face, the Windows XP operating system often doesn’t have anti-aliasing turned on by default"

@christopher

I have not as yet even looked.
But the uglier it is, the better.

;)

Sii>- my guess is that they used a TrueType font without a correctly set “gasp” table.

Sii>Did you read the article? It wasn’t talking about IE...

Are not the settings of this table up to the application to use, not the OS?

Yes in deed, I read the article. It was talking about IE, and XP too.
Should I highlight those references for you?
You are right in spirit though, in general, Font vs Ass is Mac vs Windows.
And part of the Windows issue should be solvable by the GASP.
Or at least that's what I thought, some time ago.
Have you tested a GASP table with any versions of IE ?

Cheers!

For sure. I've been looking at font rendering in IE since version 1.0, and every version I tested (with installed and EOT fonts) respected gasp settings if the OS was set to grayscale, up to the point when IE started forcing on ClearType (IE7). If the browsers use GDI and the system is set to grayscale, I see no reason why pre IE7 versions of IE would do anything differently than a regular GDI app.

>Are not the settings of this table up to the application to use, not the OS?

Typically no. The apps use the system setting. Hence IE7+ forcing on CT everywhere, not just within the browser.

>Hence IE7+ forcing on CT everywhere, not just within the browser.

Sii, I understand that if the user has left CT on by default, that all applications on windows will use it.

The settings of the GASP table, which are size specific recommendations for when to use what hints and rendering, are these up to the application or the OS to obey?

Cheers!

>Sii, I understand that if the user has left CT on by default, that all applications on windows will use it.

Not really, GDI applications will use it, but many apps do their own rendering and ignore these settings, for example InDesign, Silverlight 2, Flash, Acrobat viewer, etc.,

My guess is that Windows based browsers rely on GDI for the text rendering for performance reasons. As noted elsewhere performance trumps good typography for the webkit folks and the others too probably.

>The settings of the GASP table, which are size specific recommendations for when to use what hints and rendering, are these up to the application or the OS to obey?

Typically GDI apps do not override the system settings or a fonts gasp table if it has one. Although I think it's possible for them to do so. I can't say I've seen an application that does.

Bringing this back to browsers, if they stick with GDI they could probably have some control over the way @font-face fonts are rendered - maybe picking regular antialiasing instead of ClearType.