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Whether the font is anti-aliased or not depends on the operating system settings, not on the font itself. That said, I do notice that some custom web fonts loo

Whether the font is anti-aliased or not depends on the operating system settings, not on the font itself. That said, I do notice that some custom web fonts look ugly on Windows due to the very crisp quality of the rendering engine, especially when Cleartype is enabled. Those fonts look a lot better on Linux and Mac browsers. Therefore, whenever I choose to use a custom web font and know that my target audience includes Windows users I give more attention to selecting a proper font and testing how it renders on the page. I encourage the use of embedded fonts over traditional techniques such as image replacement, because the text looks and behaves the same as it would in other applications on the user's computer. (I'm a developer doing some design on the side)

hoopadoop 16y ago
Not quite, Windows uses hinting information from the font, OSX doesn't. Many freely available fonts contain terrible or no hinting, and they will look bad at small sizes on Windows.
- gimpf 16y ago
  Even more important: Windows uses _very_ aggressive hinting for its default fonts, especially the new set introduced with Office 2007 and Windows Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas). Though I very much like the effect for my programming font (Consolas is great in that respect), it destroys the scalability of a font to a very high degree (this is the reason why zooming a Webpage in any Browser reflows your text, and why some fonts look different in shape and/or height/width ratio in different zoom-levels; beside that rendering-engines decision to round the font-sizes to the next full pixel). IE9 promises to not do this anymore, and on high-density displays (the better smartphone ones) it is simply not needed. So the problem is two-fold: a very distinctive look of Microsoft fonts, and a sub-optimal fallback for non-aggressively hinted fonts in Windows. However, if one uses font-sizes that one can actually read (for instance, bigger then 12pt, thank you all very much) the pixel-per-character count gets big enough that the results start looking better -- especially as the user does not unconsciously move his nose to meet the display in person.
petewailes 16y ago
So what would you consider an acceptable cut-off point for Windows users, after which you'd go for an embedded font over a "safe" solution?

hoopadoop 16y ago

Not quite, Windows uses hinting information from the font, OSX doesn't. Many freely available fonts contain terrible or no hinting, and they will look bad at small sizes on Windows.

gimpf 16y ago
Even more important: Windows uses _very_ aggressive hinting for its default fonts, especially the new set introduced with Office 2007 and Windows Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas). Though I very much like the effect for my programming font (Consolas is great in that respect), it destroys the scalability of a font to a very high degree (this is the reason why zooming a Webpage in any Browser reflows your text, and why some fonts look different in shape and/or height/width ratio in different zoom-levels; beside that rendering-engines decision to round the font-sizes to the next full pixel). IE9 promises to not do this anymore, and on high-density displays (the better smartphone ones) it is simply not needed. So the problem is two-fold: a very distinctive look of Microsoft fonts, and a sub-optimal fallback for non-aggressively hinted fonts in Windows. However, if one uses font-sizes that one can actually read (for instance, bigger then 12pt, thank you all very much) the pixel-per-character count gets big enough that the results start looking better -- especially as the user does not unconsciously move his nose to meet the display in person.

petewailes 16y ago

So what would you consider an acceptable cut-off point for Windows users, after which you'd go for an embedded font over a "safe" solution?