Metapost: Firefox and ClearType

A quick public service announcement, now that I can view my website on my ancient work computer: if you're using Firefox to view my site directly, I have to say it looks much better if you view it with Clear Type turned on. There's a very nice guide here -- it's a setting in the Control Panel that takes about 20 seconds to change. I'm not 100% on other browsers; I know that IE8 and Google Chrome behave themselves, but the Blog Title and Blog Description look funny in Firefox because apparently that font isn't supported in Firefox? I've tried to fix it but eventually gave up because I figured the Blog Title font was probably not Serious Business.

But, yeah, that Clear Type setting does wonders, imho.

7 comments:

keri said...

So *that's* why the internet and everything else looked so shitty when I was temporarily accidentally downgraded to XP for a month. (Trying to do a fresh-install of Vista, didn't realize my CD was XP instead, and it was 3 days after my warranty expired, so the manufacturer wouldn't give me a new Vista CD.) I just upgraded to Win7 last night, and text on everything is so much improved, but especially in Firefox.

Anyway, from what I just learned, you only need to turn ClearType on for XP - it's already on by default in Vista and Win7. So "ancient" is probably right. :P

Also, your blog title and description show up in Times New Roman for me. It's not funny, but it's not fancy, either. (And I usually get your posts through GoogleReader, so.)

Ana Mardoll said...

That makes sense - work computer is running XP and home computer has Win7.

The Blog Title in Chrome/IE8 is sort of scribbly, and the description is in cursive. Times New Roman is not my favorite, but since most of you are apparently using Google Reader anyway, I didn't figure it was something to stress over. *grins*

Brin Bellway said...

The Blog Title in Chrome/IE8 is sort of scribbly, and the description is in cursive.

Oh good, I already have that. But then, I'm on Ubuntu Lynx. (Not actually a Linux geek, by the way. My dad talked me into it, assuring me he could trick Shockwave into working and if I wanted to play Age of Empires I could switch back to XP by rebooting.)
If I go here while on Windows and it looks off, hopefully I'll remember why.

since most of you are apparently using Google Reader anyway

Just to let me know when to come look here. I'm accustomed to reading blog posts on their respective sites, and I don't see any reason to adjust to the Google reading interface when I'll just have to click through to check comments anyway.

The Dread Pirate Matt said...

Problem for Firefox on Mac OS X as well. Everything renders fine in Chrome and Opera (including the Calibri font for the body of the post). FF, however,  doesn't seem to be playing nice with the web font javascript, so is reverting to the browser's default font. (Everything in mine, including the body of the post, is rendered in Times New Roman in FF.)

FF also fails to pick up the 'Subscribe by email' and 'RSS' image icons for Disqus as well as incorrectly formatting the timestamps (at least on my machine).

Ana Mardoll said...

And also, good call on the issue being behind a proxy. I was wondering why the fonts worked at home, but not work. I downloaded the 2 fonts and installed them on my work computer and viola! Instant fix. Thank you. :)

Ana Mardoll said...

@The Dread Pirate Matt

Dread Pirate Matt, you are now FREAKING AWESOME Pirate Matt. Thank you for hunting those down and providing a link for everyone!!

The Dread Pirate Matt said...

Found a fix for the header fonts in Firefox (for those who would like them to display correctly). Go to http://www.google.com/webfonts/ and download the fonts "Just Another Hand" and "Coming Soon". For some reason Firefox has problems loading them via the web (particularly from behind a proxy).

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