Font Smoothing
October 21st, 2007Due to primarily using a Macintosh at home, which is also the machine of choice to design and maintain my website, I have been taking the aesthetic advantages of using OS X for granted. Apart from testing for general structural integrity of my website in Windows-based browsers, I rarely examine the look and feel that Windows portrays for my site.
OS X uses a font rendering and screen smoothing mechanism that is unparalleled. My choice of images and fonts for the website was not accurately displayed across all platforms, as I recently found out. Certain images with lower resolutions seemed to have jagged edges (notably, the RSS feed button in the sidebar). A side-by-side comparison of ssaidoor.com, with Safari on Mac OS X and Internet Explorer (and Firefox) on Windows XP, evinced glaring differences in the font and image rendering, with the illustration being of generally inferior quality on Windows.
I’ve made some changes to mitigate these differences, such as adding a new higher-resolution image for the RSS feed button. I need to experiment with some new fonts for the website.
