Forcing Anti-Aliasing Using CSS: Is This a Myth

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.

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;
}

Does CSS support text anti-aliasing such as crisp, sharp etc yet?

Not only is it not possible, but different browsers on the market enforce different antialiasing settings, meaning that you can't get consistent results, even if they are not what you want.

For a good article on how the various browsers deal with font rendering, I'd suggest reading this: http://blog.typekit.com/2010/10/21/type-rendering-web-browsers/

Is it possible to disable anti-aliasing in CSS when using @font-face with pixel fonts?

Font rendering is done by the operating system and browser, so, as of yet, I believe there is little that you can do with CSS. There may be some proposed CSS rules in discussion (I've seen mention "font-smooth" or something like that), but nothing in CSS3, as far as I know, and definitely nothing in CSS2.

Text anti aliasing and font smoothing

There is no 'font smoothing' in Flex. Font smoothing is a term used in Windows. If you go into your control panel and open up the 'ClearType Tuning' and go to the 'Advanced' tab, you'll nothing that it mentions font smoothing.

This needs to be set for Flex fonts to have anti-aliasing because Flex uses the OS' default settings for fonts and if font smoothing is disabled, embedded fonts won't be able to AA with ClearType.

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