Font Smoothing Detection in Browsers

latitude · on Aug 28, 2011

That's my stuff. The page has been up for about 3 months now and the stats will go up in a week or two.

Also, about a month ago I amended the test script to check which fonts are installed on visitor's machine. I think it could make a fairly interesting data point too. The script is currently checking for

  Arial
  Calibri
  Candara
  Lucida Sans Unicode
  Segoe UI
  Verdana

  Helvetica
  Lucida Grande

  Georgia
  Droid Sans

It was also supposed to check for Trebuchet MS, but I misspelled it :) If anyone has any suggestions for additional fonts to test for, I am all ears.

rorrr · on Aug 28, 2011

Do you realize that there's RGB, BRG, vertial-RGB, vertical-BGR possible subpixel layouts in LCDs?

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

Does your script take that into consideration?

latitude · on Aug 29, 2011

It does not tell apart between these, no. It simply checks if there is any color fringing going on after a glyph is rasterized.

irskep · on Aug 28, 2011

I think it's a mistake to classify all subpixel-level renderers as ClearType. There are different styles of subpixel rendering, some of which look better than others with large @font-face fonts.

The system described puts Windows 7 and iOS in the same category, which is a really bad idea IMO.

latitude · on Aug 29, 2011

> There are different styles of subpixel rendering, some of which look better than others with large @font-face fonts.

An example would be nice. Also, do keep in mind the context, which is an issue of a poor rendering of non-CT hinted fonts on Windows.

> The system described puts Windows 7 and iOS in the same category, which is a really bad idea IMO.

The JS detection result is meant to be used in conjunction with the UserAgent string of course, not just on its own.

CamperBob · on Aug 29, 2011

I'd prefer that browser developers give me more choices regarding how fonts should be rendered. Firefox 6 seems to have made an effort to look more like IE9, which is why I don't use IE9, and why I immediately Googled for hacks to disable forced Cleartype rendering as soon as I installed FF6.

I know it's hard to believe, but not everybody likes Cleartype. And I'm tired of killing the first 4 hours every Firefox upgrade searching to figure out how to put things back the way they were.