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I'm using google webfonts and they fine at super large font sizes, but at 18px, they look awful. I've read here and there that there are solutions for font smoothing, but I haven't found any where that explains it clearly and the few snippets I have found don't work at all.

My h4 looks awful in pretty much every browser, but Chrome is the worst. In Chrome, pretty much all of my fonts look terrible.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Perhaps you know of a resource that explains this clearly? Thanks!

EXAMPLE SCREENSHOT #1

This screenshot shows the homepage of https://www.dartlang.org/, a programming language that is made by Google (so we can imply that this website is also build by Google) and uses Google Webfonts.

Screenshot shows Google Chrome on the left, Firefox/Internet Explorer on the right.:

google chrome on the left, firefox/internet explorer on the right

EXAMPLE SCREENSHOT #2

This screenshot shows a product info page on Adobe.com, using webfonts provided by Typekit. Adobe & Typekit are professionals when it comes to fonts.

Screenshot shows Google Chrome on the right, Firefox/Internet Explorer on the left:

google chrome on the left, firefox/internet explorer on the right

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imakeitpretty
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  • they look good to me in chrome and firefox ... could you add a printscreen? – JFK Jul 14 '12 at 21:21
  • Also on iPhone/iOS they look very good. – insertusernamehere Jul 14 '12 at 22:44
  • Are you using Windows? If so, the OS's ClearType smoothing engine might be the cause. I've tried that page out in Mac OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Chrome OS in addition to Windows; the latter being the only one which doesn't render properly, because of what I suspect is the ClearType engine. – Jules Jul 15 '12 at 01:34
  • yes it's windows. Do you know what I can do about it? – imakeitpretty Jul 15 '12 at 01:50
  • just discovered this useful feature: chrome://flags/#lcd-text-aa - enable it and it smooths text for you – cinek Aug 15 '16 at 13:47

4 Answers4

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Status of the issue, June 2014: Fixed with Chrome 37

Finally, the Chrome team will release a fix for this issue with Chrome 37 which will be released to public in July 2014. See example comparison of current stable Chrome 35 and latest Chrome 37 (early development preview) here:

enter image description here

Status of the issue, December 2013

1.) There is NO proper solution when loading fonts via @import, <link href= or Google's webfont.js. The problem is that Chrome simply requests .woff files from Google's API which render horribly. Surprisingly all other font file types render beautifully. However, there are some CSS tricks that will "smoothen" the rendered font a little bit, you'll find the workaround(s) deeper in this answer.

2.) There IS a real solution for this when self-hosting the fonts, first posted by Jaime Fernandez in another answer on this Stackoverflow page, which fixes this issue by loading web fonts in a special order. I would feel bad to simply copy his excellent answer, so please have a look there. There is also an (unproven) solution that recommends using only TTF/OTF fonts as they are now supported by nearly all browsers.

3.) The Google Chrome developer team works on that issue. As there have been several huge changes in the rendering engine there's obviously something in progress.

I've written a large blog post on that issue, feel free to have a look: How to fix the ugly font rendering in Google Chrome

Reproduceable examples

See how the example from the initial question look today, in Chrome 29:

POSITIVE EXAMPLE:

Left: Firefox 23, right: Chrome 29

enter image description here

POSITIVE EXAMPLE:

Top: Firefox 23, bottom: Chrome 29

enter image description here

NEGATIVE EXAMPLE: Chrome 30

enter image description here

NEGATIVE EXAMPLE: Chrome 29

enter image description here

Solution

Fixing the above screenshot with -webkit-text-stroke:

enter image description here

First row is default, second has:

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.3px;

Third row has:

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.6px;

So, the way to fix those fonts is simply giving them

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.Xpx;

or the RGBa syntax (by nezroy, found in the comments! Thanks!)

-webkit-text-stroke: 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.1)

There's also an outdated possibility: Give the text a simple (fake) shadow:

text-shadow: #fff 0px 1px 1px;

RGBa solution (found in Jasper Espejo's blog):

text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(51,51,51,0.2);

I made a blog post on this:

If you want to be updated on this issue, have a look on the according blog post: How to fix the ugly font rendering in Google Chrome. I'll post news if there're news on this.

My original answer:

This is a big bug in Google Chrome and the Google Chrome Team does know about this, see the official bug report here. Currently, in May 2013, even 11 months after the bug was reported, it's not solved. It's a strange thing that the only browser that messes up Google Webfonts is Google's own browser Chrome (!). But there's a simple workaround that will fix the problem, please see below for the solution.

STATEMENT FROM GOOGLE CHROME DEVELOPMENT TEAM, MAY 2013

Official statement in the bug report comments:

Our Windows font rendering is actively being worked on. ... We hope to have something within a milestone or two that developers can start playing with. How fast it goes to stable is, as always, all about how fast we can root out and burn down any regressions.

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Sliq
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    The problem is not in all the browsers running on Windows, it's just in the case of Chrome. Firefox, Opera and IE have proper anti-aliasing of the fonts. Although, it can be fixed in chrome by using `-webkit-font-smoothing` property. See my answer below. – Kushagra Jul 17 '12 at 05:59
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    For black text, I used `text-shadow: #333 0px 0px 1px;`. Thanks a lot for the tip. – Yoone Mar 08 '13 at 20:10
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    Maybe it got lost in translation but -webkit-text-stroke only works when you use an alpha of the color of the font. So for a black font I use something like "-webkit-text-stroke: 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.1)". – nezroy Mar 28 '13 at 01:03
  • I've noticed that Chrome 30 on Mac is now exhibiting the same lack of antialiasing. – jwadsack Oct 16 '13 at 23:16
  • @jwadsack Can you give more info (screenshots etc.) ? – Sliq Nov 14 '13 at 09:31
  • @Panique I just updated to Chrome 31 which is no longer exhibiting it. If I get another machine on 30 I'll grab a screen shot – jwadsack Nov 14 '13 at 20:29
  • I had a similar problem on Kubuntu; it had to do with Chrome being the only browser that I had that _actually respected_ the system-level "font antialiasing" setting. I had turned it off years ago when I had a really bad video card and never bothered turned it back on. Turning _on_ system-level antialiasing fixed the problem for me. See [this page](http://blog.sensecodons.com/2013/11/chromechromium-roboto-and-horrible-text.html) for a similar story. – Douglas Manley Dec 06 '13 at 06:30
  • @jwadsack Using Chrome 32.0.1700.107 m in Windows 8 x64, and it is still exhibiting the unwanted aliasing behavior. – namuol Feb 10 '14 at 23:46
  • @namuol Read the article. – Sliq Feb 10 '14 at 23:50
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    In the official ticket on the chrome board for this issue https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 it seems to be aimed as fix for v37, if I've undrestand correctly the last post in the thread. – Gruber May 12 '14 at 19:21
  • Since v52 or so they removed GDI rendering, which causes blurry fonts (I think due to "direct write" - whatever this is...). The Patch was made only by one or two people and they refuse to change it back. Blurry text everywhere - nearly unreadable. Even in the newest version. Like they are blind or so. Our customers complain. This is 2017... – StanE Jan 23 '17 at 19:21
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I had the same problem, and I found the solution in this post of Sam Goddard,

The solution if to defined the call to the font twice. First as it is recommended, to be used for all the browsers, and after a particular call only for Chrome with a special media query:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'chunk-webfont';
  src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.eot');
  src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('eot'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.svg') format('svg');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
  @font-face {
    font-family: 'chunk-webfont';
    src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.svg') format('svg');
  }
}

enter image description here

With this method the font will render good in all browsers. The only negative point that I found is that the font file is also downloaded twice.

You can find an spanish version of this article in my page

Dave Markle
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Jaime Fernandez
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    This is actually the correct answer, however it can be simplified. Simply listing the SVG version FIRST in the list of fonts solves the issue too! – jduncanator Nov 03 '13 at 05:26
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    This answer gives — by far — the best results. The SVG font looks x100 better than the -webkit-text-stroke hack. The main downside is the font-size of the SVG version; it's normally much bigger :-( Google really needs to get this sorted a.s.a.p. – Timidfriendly Nov 06 '13 at 15:40
  • I totally agree ! I'll link to this answer from within my answer. – Sliq Nov 08 '13 at 21:03
  • @jduncanator Listing the SVG first is not advisable — this means the SVG font will be loaded by *every single browser* that supports it, while you just need it for Chrome on Windows. – RoelN Apr 02 '14 at 10:59
  • @jduncanator The two main culprits are no hinting support and the large filesize (gzip compression for fonts is not enabled by default on many server). – RoelN Apr 05 '14 at 08:41
  • Chrome no longer supports svg fonts as of chrome 38 – Abdi Dec 17 '20 at 10:22
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Chrome doesn't render the fonts like Firefox or any other browser does. This is generally a problem in Chrome running on Windows only. If you want to make the fonts smooth, use the -webkit-font-smoothing property on yer h4 tags like this.

h4 {
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
}

You can also use subpixel-antialiased, this will give you different type of smoothing (making the text a little blurry/shadowed). However, you will need a nightly version to see the effects. You can learn more about font smoothing here.

Kushagra
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    I have latest version Chrome today 8-feb-2013 and this page here shows no difference between them http://maxvoltar.com/sandbox/fontsmoothing/ – thednp Feb 08 '13 at 12:32
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    This doesn't work (tested on windows). As mac's do this anyway I down marked to dissuade people from using it. – KryptoniteDove Feb 20 '13 at 16:54
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    This does not work. I just tried it on Windows 8. With whatever the latest version of Chrome is (as of 10/8/2013). – jay_t55 Aug 09 '13 at 23:29
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    On Mac Chrome and Safari this DOES work so it is worth adding. Apple.com even uses it in their base.css stylesheet: `body { font: 12px/18px "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; }` – Justin Aug 22 '13 at 20:08
  • @Justin they also seem to use Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana before sans-serif, which would show the best one one a given platform. – Tracker1 Jan 22 '14 at 23:28
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    the firefox equivalent is -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; – Jeff Walters Dec 04 '14 at 01:52
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Ok you can use this simply

-webkit-text-stroke-width: .7px;
-webkit-text-stroke-color: #34343b;
-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;

Make sure your text color and upper text-stroke-width must me same and that's it.

Sliq
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Rishabh Gupta
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