Charles Roper

November 23 2009 @ 02:10am #

For me, the most exciting development is support for Direct2D and DirectWrite. In particular, @font-face type rendering will be significantly improved. The race is on now for all browsers to implement DirectWrite. Having @font-face support is one thing, but how those fonts are actually rendered to the screen is another. At present, only Safari does a good job of rendering type. Unless they are hinted exceptionally well, many if not most fonts, particularly at smaller sizes, look absolutely terrible on Windows.

Jon Tan is right when he says, “ClearType fails to deliver good anti-aliasing.” I would expand upon that by saying it also fails to deliver good rendering of badly hinted fonts. So let’s get some pressure on the other browser makers to get DirectWrite support into their browsers now.

At least we now know it’ll feature in IE9 so that vast majority of web users will be able to benefit. Not that they’ll notice.