Fonts not rendering with DirectWrite in IE, need Fontlab > Webfont instructions

James Puckett
James Puckett Posts: 1,992
edited February 2014 in Technique and Theory
I have manually hinted a font in FontLab. Webfonts generated with Fontprep and FontSquirrel render gorgeously with DirectWrite in Firefox but in Internet Explorer 11 I’m getting GDI Cleartype text, which isn’t acceptable in this font because the outlines are distressed. Are there instructions for getting a good (for IE) webfont out of a TTF hinted and generated with Fontlab?

Comments

  • Robin Mientjes
    Robin Mientjes Posts: 132
    I run ttf2eot, because Fontsquirrel has been giving me strange EOT exports lately. Not sure what the core of the issue is, but it doesn’t happen with ttf2eot.

    I might still be doing it wrong somewhere else, but, 90% of the font-to-web workflow is a hack anyway.
  • PabloImpallari
    PabloImpallari Posts: 806
    90% of the font-to-web workflow is a hack anyway.
    Amen
  • Matthew Butterick
    Matthew Butterick Posts: 143
    To be fair, 90% of the *-to-web workflow is a hack.
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    hi James, are you sure you are getting GDI rendering on all webpages? can you post a screenshot?
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    Actually I think that I’m not even getting Cleartype rendering. I’m getting the same nasty rendering in IE that’s typical in Chrome.

    A comparison shot is attached. IE 11 is on the left, Firefox 26.0 is on the right. This is a distressed display font that has some basic hinting to keep pixels from popping out all over the place, so a good deal of wonkiness is expected. But the “32 points” line shows things going really wrong, with letters even crashing horizontally.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    edited February 2014
    I can’t even get an installable TTF file to load with IE 11. I’m pretty sure this is an IE issue because Chrome will load it. I’m going to try installing multiple versions of IE and hope this is just crazy IE 11 bullshit. edit: same problem with IE 9.

    Is there a way to set the GASP header to enable Cleartype in Fontlab? It’s not enabled in the TTF right out of Fontlab or Fontprep. But Fontsquirrel and Transtype fix it. At least that’s what I see when I open the fonts with Openmaster

    Is there a way to dump an file with TTX?

    I used ttf2eot to generate and EOT file from the Fontlab TTF file. The results are unchanged.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    edited February 2014
    I used TTX to manually replace the GASP table with 
    <gasp>
    <gaspRange rangeMaxPPEM="65535" rangeGaspBehavior="15"/>
</gasp>.
    No change.
  • SiDaniels
    SiDaniels Posts: 277
    According to the IE team the page seems to be rendered using a pre IE9 compatibility mode. which suggests that the problem may be with the web page and not the font.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    Thanks, Simon. I'll keep at it.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    Problem solved! Thanks to Simon and Karsten. It turns out I needed to add the following meta tag to the header of the web page to get the rendering to work:
    <meta http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible' content='IE=edge,chrome=1'>

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