What font embedding technique can suppress anti-aliasing?

Question

I am confused by all the different methods of embedding fonts, Cufon, @ font-face, FLIR, Typekit, etc., and I don’t know where to start, especially since I need only one specific behavior. Are there any font embedding methods that will render the font without anti-aliasing / anti-aliasing / ClearTyping?

I always simply designed everything that my computer / monitor does, and did not even think about it twice. But with this particular site, I use opacity on a div that floats on glass PNG, and ClearType is just a disaster. Anti-aliasing ClearType against this background, the combo stands out gloomily, creating, in fact, a bold font. If I apply an alpha opacity filter in IE8, it will remove ClearTyping, showing me only one-time touches and looks perfect.

So, are there any font embedding methods that can be used to disable anti-aliasing rendering in a cross browser? I know it is likely that there will be sIFR, but I would prefer not to use Flash, since my target audience would most likely be the main one who would not update it: B&M companies.

Answer 1

From a technical point of view, no font embedding technology will allow you to suppress anti-aliasing. What you need is a CSS property to tell the browser what you prefer if some of the elements on your page have not been smoothed.

Now, although this may not be useful for all your endeavors, especially if most of the audience does not use WebKit-based browsers, some WebKit browsers support something similar to the proposed font-smooth CSS property , as described in the Max Voltar post when smoothing fonts using :

 -webkit-font-smoothing: none; 

It would be similar to the font-smooth property proposed by W3C:

 font-smooth: never; 

Max's article also links to Christophe Zilgens's demo page , which shows you the effect in action with the warning that it only works on OS X.

As Aram Kocharian says, it could be so - right now - you cannot rely on this property and must leave it to allow the browser.

Some previous Internet Explorer engines are also a text alias, if the opacity parameter is set to a value other than 1 - you can try 0.999 as a value and see what happens there.