

Font Smoothing Detection in Browsers - latitude
http://swapped.cc/font-smoothing

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

------
stevejohnson
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
> _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
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.

