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For a site we're developing we've been using Lato from Google's WebFonts API. It works perfectly in every browser (even IE), except for one very important case: Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP (haven't tested in Win 7 yet). The font loads and is displayed, but the characters look awful, like antialiasing completely malfunctioned.

This is what the text looks like in FF3.6

My googling has found hits about problems with webfonts in FF4 due to a bug in the browser, but I can't find anything about 3.6. Is there something we can do to fix this?

Twipped
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  • It's possible to apply a bold style to an already bold font, which is failsville. You'll also want ClearType enabled, if you haven't already done so. – reisio Apr 13 '11 at 23:36

2 Answers2

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The reason Google's font looks like that has to do with a setting in the font's GASP table. This table toggles 'grayscale' and 'gridfitting' for ranges of sizes. I looked at the font Google is sending to your site and for sizes 0-13 grayscale is turned on. 14-18 is set for gridfitting, which results in black and white rendering. Then 19+ is set for both grayscale and gridfitting. I bet if you changed the size of the text to 13px, it would suddenly turn antialiased.

As for Font Squirrel fonts, we set the GASP table to render grayscale+gridfitting for all sizes above 4px.

Font Squirrel
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  • I switched to the Font Squirrel version and, after tweaking the stylesheet a bit, it works perfectly. Thank you for the in-depth explanation. – Twipped Apr 14 '11 at 00:31
  • Helped me out as well! I was having trouble with Google served Lato Light -- on any Windows browser, it looked terrible (OS X was fine). Loading the font squirrel ttf's from my server solved the problem. – Jared Goodner Jan 08 '14 at 17:59
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There seems to be a difference between Google webfonts and the same font downloaded from Font Squirrel, see this (unrelated...) question.

So I would try and use the version they have at Font Squirrel to see if that solves the problem.

Community
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jeroen
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