Css: @Font-Face Anti Aliasing

CSS: @font-face anti aliasing

With CSS3, you can use the font-smooth property, although antialiasing will still be controlled by the system defaults. If you really need to force a clean antialiasing no matter what the OS is, you have to use sIFR which automatically replace the text with a Flash component.

How to apply font anti-alias effects in CSS?

here you go Sir :-)

1

.myElement{
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
}

2

.myElement{
    text-shadow: rgba(0,0,0,.01) 0 0 1px;
}

@font-face anti-aliasing on windows and mac

This just looks like the normal ugly way fonts are rendered in WinXP. Some (IMO: misguided) people even prefer it.

To get anti-aliasing for desktop fonts in general on XP you have to turn it on, from Display Properties -> Appearance -> Effects -> Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts -> ClearType. The default setting “Standard” is the old-school Windows “font smudging” technique that only bothers to turn on at larger font sizes, and then often makes a mess.

IE7+ has an option—on by default—to always use ClearType anti-aliasing to render fonts in the web browser. Other web browsers will respect the user's configured font rendering method. It is a shame that so many people still have this beneficial setting turned off, but it's not really your problem.

(There is nasty hack to make Chrome perform some anti-aliasing on text, which is:

text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0);

but I seriously wouldn't recommend it.)

One thing you can do when the “Use the following method...” setting is set to “Standard”, to try to make the font get some form of anti-aliasing, is to check that the font in question doesn't have a GASP table telling old-fashioned TrueType renderers to disable anti-aliasing at particular font sizes. You can change the GASP table using a font editor or with the ttfgasp.exe command-line tool.

Forcing anti-aliasing using css: Is this a myth?

No, there's not really any way to control this as a web developer.

Small exceptions are that you can do some fake forcing of anti-aliasing by using Flash through sIFR, and some browsers won't anti-alias bitmap/pixel fonts (as they shouldn't, more info: Anti-Aliasing / Anti-Anti-Aliasing).

Also, as Daniel mentioned, it's ideal to be using em units for all fonts, see The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS for more information about this.

@font-face alias issues on PC

That's a Hinting problem.

When you generate your font-face kit (like in FontSquirrel), you need to specify Hinting on the Expert options.

Choose Expert, and under Rendering, select:

Apply Hinting - Improve Win rendering.

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