No subpixel rendering in flash fonts in Chrome?

Hello,

I am having a problem with blurry fonts in Chrome (in FF and IE everything looks fine).
I tried to look closer at the issue and it looks like there is no subpixel rendering in Chrome.

I have prepared a screenshot comparison, please take a look:


As you can see, I am running a site with arrow words crosswords, hence it is crucial to have sharp small size fonts. Unfortunately, pixel fonts are not a solution, as I need unicode; there are some strange characters in crossword clues from time to time.

You may check the effect at the site (solvemall dot com)

Any clues how to improve the issue?

I am using textField with device font, tried _sans, Arial, various sizes, nothing really helps.

Hi Pryma,

Hopefully I can shed some light on things for you. Different browsers use different technologies to render the fonts. There are typically two different systems that are used and that is:

GDI ClearType
DirectWrite

Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox both use DirectWrite. Firefox used to use GDI Cleartype as the default, but it now uses DirectWrite as the default. I believe users can still change which one is used in the options for Firefox. Chrome and Opera both use GDI ClearType.

This can cause differences in spacing of letters which is how I first learned about it as I was trying to figure out why text on one of my sites was taking up different amounts of widths in different browsers. I believe this is also the cause of your issue.

Anyway here are a few good reads for you which might help you get going in the right direction to understand your problem more fully:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-font-rendering/

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-versus-directwrite

http://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/2011/08/11/directwrite-text-rendering-in-firefox-6/

As far as how to actually fix your problem, I do not know offhand of any resolution. Maybe someone else knows more on how to address your problem. The only thing I can think of offhand would be to avoid using the browser's font rendering system.