Grainy webfonts on a per machine basis

Question

Ladies and Gents

Strange situation. Building a site using some web fonts from Fontsquirrel. Using the @font-face as provided. Fonts look great on the whole - tested on Chrome/FF (linux box), Chrome/FF/Opera (android tablet), IE (windows phone). However on my Windows 7 machine, the fonts look terrible (really grainy, no anti-aliasing) across ALL browsers (FF, Chrome, IE 10, 9, 8, Opera) - I'm finding this both odd and ungoogleable.

Have played with various bits of CSS (text-rendering: optimizeLegibility, text-shadows, font-smooth(ing), that sort of thing) but no change.

Was also curious whether there was a difference between the site being served locally or via the web (AWS) - there isn't.

Would appreciate suggestions.

For reference, the fonts are:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/patua-one?q[term]=patua&q[search_check]=Y

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Aaargh?q[term]=aaargh&q[search_check]=Y

The first one is particularly bad and I notice that since I downloaded it, the licence seems to have changed and you can't use the Webfont Kit tab now to download the CSS - no idea if this is relevant. I do have a Fontsquirrel approved @font-face declaration for it though.

The final mystery - the fonts look fine on the Windows box on Fontsquirrel - go figure!

Thanks in advance.

Should also add that font-weight: normal is applied and I done the old CTRL -, CTRL + zoom in/out trick to see if they change - they don't. — nick-brown, Sep 10 '13 at 12:06
A simple application of logic shows that there is nothing wrong with the fonts as they show correctly on the fontsquirrel site. The problem lies in how I am serving this site to a particular subset of machines. — nick-brown, Sep 10 '13 at 12:15

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '13 at 08:11

Linux (& maybe Android) can autohint unhinted fonts so they look good even on screens with low pixel density, and the pixel density of the phone is probably enough lack of hinting is not catastrophic

Windows however absolutely relies on font hints to display them properly so you need to either switch to already hinted fonts or use something like http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/ to simulate Linux autohinting on windows.

Grainy webfonts on a per machine basis

1 Answers1