Caution: my English is far from perfect. (Русский тоже не всегда хорош).

Monday 20 January 2014

How many more years it will take Chrome and FireFox to learn display text properly?

These are original size screenshots of some page heading.
I think such bad results may be achieved if Chrome and FireFox rasterize first and scale after that, instead of scaling first and then rasterizing.
To reproduce, here is the code: <h1 style="font-size: 300%; color: #4f81bd; font-style: italic; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">WINTER ACTION</h1>

Update: Many people reported FireFox and Chrome render fonts OK for them. HN comment and tnm91 suggested that DirectWrite may be disabled, due to outdated video driver. It was true, I updated diver and DirectWrite become enabled, but rendered hadn't changed. Then sulliwan suggested to check CliearType - I enabled it and now FireFox and Chrome render text OK.

Thanks for the help!

8 comments:

xkahn said...

On my laptop, I tested both Chrome and Firefox and had beautiful text rendering. That's on Linux.

I've seen Macintosh rendering text nicely in these browsers as well.

Maybe you're seeing a Windows bug?

funnymoose321 said...

Most other Windows apps look fine, so probably not a windows bug. In any case, browser vendors should make sure their apps work well on all supported platforms.

William said...

Tested on my Mac, Chrome 32.0.1700.77

No problem--Looks good.

cbhl said...

Have you tried using "--enable-direct-write"?

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692

sajith said...

It is a problem with windows. Try installing Mactype [https://code.google.com/p/mactype/] to obtain smooth font rendering on windows

Mark V said...

It's Windows. They need to fix that.

I wouldn't call it a bug, it has been like that for years.

I think because of text like that, it made me jump to using a mac more.

sulliwan said...

Hey, it's because you got Cleartype disabled on your Windows system. IE uses it's own version of Cleartype regardless of system settings, while Firefox and Chrome correctly adhere to your system settings.

A. V. said...

@sulliwan thanks for the ClearType hint, enabling it fixed the problem (I also updated video driver before this)

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