Stretching in IE

Kyle Wayne Benson
Kyle Wayne Benson Posts: 14
in Technique and Theory
Has anyone had this problem with web font rendering? The first is with Chrome, the second is with IE. It looks like it's misunderstanding alignment zones, but I've double checked and everything is correct in the files. Is there something obvious I'm not understanding?


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Comments

  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,013
    I’ve seen browsers do some wacky stuff but never this. What are you using to generate the fonts and how are you building the web fonts?
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,013
    Looks like bad hinting.

    Maybe, but what bothers me is that Chrome and IE supposedly both use DirectWrite now. Which means that either IE is falling back to an older rasterizer or one of the two browsers is tweaking the output of DirectWrite. This is the second time this week that I’ve seen mismatched rendering between these browsers. As type designers we should lobby Microsoft and Google to explain exactly WTF is going on with their text rendering so that we know what we’re building fonts for.

  • attar
    attar Posts: 209
    edited April 2015
    I've seen such a thing with webfonts generated from the FontSquirrel generator in the past. It would rather randomly generate botched fonts so I just retried until it would produce something useful.
    Nowadays I use software locally, at least do you then know what you are running.
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    Could someone send me the problematic font, I can try and figure out what the problem is. Mikedu@
    Microsoft.com
  • Göran Söderström
    Göran Söderström Posts: 40
    Have you been using ttfautohint?
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    it would be useful to know how the font was hinted. I dont think TTFAutohint causes such problems.
  • Robin Mientjes
    Robin Mientjes Posts: 132
    It’s funny you mention alignment zones, because every time I’ve had this happen has been with bad (or no) alignment zones going through FontSquirrel with TTFAH. I hate to ask if you’re entirely sure, so I’ll just leave this here for future searchers: yes, this can happen. There can be multiple reasons.
  • Paul van der Laan
    Paul van der Laan Posts: 243
    An incident like this once happened to me when I had my glyphs scaled to 2048 units, yet the alignment zones were still on the 1000 unit grid.
  • Kyle Wayne Benson
    Kyle Wayne Benson Posts: 14
    Like many have said, it's likely the problem was the FontSquirrel webfont generator. It produced that result over and over again—but when the eot and woff files were generated locally instead, there were no problems. Tom Grace did the hinting, so I can't answer as to whether he used TTFAH.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,265
    I like the /t with the tall ascender. 
    Washington “Capital”!
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    this might be a naive question, but why do folks use font squirrel? to generate web fonts? if so, why not, not allow it to autohint, i think there is an option for that, or tell it use TTFautohint, which i hope is v. 1.3
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 424
    Pretty sure that’s just an interpolation: Qualtrics Grotesque DaFont Extended

    I’ve used Font Squirrel for testing (with autohinting turned off) and never had any of these issues.

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