On June 28, 2011, Microsoft released updated versions of Arial, Tahoma and Verdana fonts.

Anyone who has read Tim Braun's two excellent articles, “ Type rendering: operating systems ” and then “ Type rendering: web browsers ” (in October 2010) or independently research the same question, knows that in Windows, depending on Windows versions, browsers can use one or two different anti-aliasing (smoothing outlines) of the rendered font.

The best of the two is the ClearType system in DirectWrite (which modern versions of IE and Firefox use in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 — as well as in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, if Platform Update is installed there): in it the outlines are smoothed as in horizontal direction (using subpixel rendering ClearType), and in the vertical.

The former ClearType system in GDI + (which literally all browsers use in Windows XP) is less good: it uses only subpixel rendering of font outlines in the horizontal direction - but doesn’t prevent the “steps” from appearing when the symbol line jumps in the vertical direction from one lines of pixels to another. This feature makes it particularly painful to display almost horizontal lines - available, for example, in yesterday’s Russo font .
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But it turns out that the opposite problem happens: those fonts, the look of which the designer-designer was completely satisfied for many years in Windows XP, in some sizes can become unpleasantly thin after they are displayed in DirectWrite in more modern operating systems. Such were, in particular, the fonts Arial, Tahoma and Verdana, distributed by Microsoft Corporation as part of the operating systems of the Windows family. On the DebugTheWeb site, you can easily find the test page where you can see screenshots showing your problem (and to put it on <canvas>) ; You can compare your display of fonts with the reference one there.

Microsoft has released update KB2545698 to fix this problem; its essence was soon set forth in the blogs of employees of Microsoft Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation , because the eliminated problem was equally concerned with the display of three fonts in IE and in Firefox. The update contains new versions of all three fonts: Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana. They became clearer and fatter.

And since in Russia too many Windows users neglect those updates of the operating system that seem to them to be minor, it seems to me important to attract to this update the attention of those Habrahabr users who take care of the display of fonts.

I remind the users of the Firefox browser that it (starting from the version of Firefox 7) has a special hidden setting: a list of such fonts (system, and not downloaded from the Internet by the @ font-face directive ), for which a size less than sixteen pixels is forced GDI instead of DirectWrite. By default, the list contains Arial, Consolas, Courier New, Microsoft Sans Serif, Segoe UI, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS and Verdana fonts, as you can see in the open source code . After installing fatter versions of the three above-mentioned fonts, you can manually remove them from this list using the about: config page .

I’ll say one more thing: in this case it will be wise to remove only these three fonts from the list, without touching the rest, in which the above described problem has not gone away. Here, for example, is a comparison of the Segoe UI mappings in GDI + and DirectWrite, cited in the Graphic bits blog: