Question

EDIT:

We’re in Chrome 19 now, and this still isn’t fixed. Just a clarification: this happens in Chrome on Windows, not Linux or Mac. I think it has to do with Cleartype. Google, please fix this.

I’ve been using CSS3 text-shadow to emulate IE9’s font smoothing on other browsers. Basically I’ve just set the text-shadow of a container’s text to the container’s background. You can see the behavior by setting text-shadow on a largish font element in anything lower than Chrome 14.0.833. The text looks smooth. Remove the text-shadow and the font looks jagged.
However, in Chrome 14.0.833 (UPDATE: appears it’s also "broken" in 14.0.834) this no longer works. The text-shadow property still works, but not in the way it did before. You can see the behavior here (just load it up with diff. Chrome versions)
It seems as if in the older Chromes the text shadow began inside the text just a little and then spread out – which is perhaps why the text-shadow hack worked. In the newer Chrome, it appears the text shadow starts just outside the text, which is why it won’t work. See what I mean here.

My question is basically: Is this a bug? Which is expected behavior, if either? Are there any other font smoothing workarounds I can use?

The W3C’s spec didn’t seem to say what the intended behavior is, though I did see that perhaps I should be using text-outline (which is kinda unsupported, which defeats the purpose)

Answer 1

Well, I’ve figured it out, sorta. Annoying since I set a bounty, but whatever.
I’m fairly certain this is not a bug and it is expected behavior – especially since we’ve seen a few more iterations of Chrome and it’s stayed the same.
A few different methods work. I wrote up a bit for my blog, you can see the full article here, but here’s the bulk of it:

First, I tried the -webkit-text-stroke:1px #000 where #000 is the
color of the text. But this style is meant for use where the color of
the text is different from the stroke, for a nice text-outline. When
both are the same color, it looks…odd. I’m not sure why; I’m no
font-rendering expert. You can see the behavior in the picture after
the article.

Next I tried a simple text-shadow:#000 0 0 1px where #000 is the same
color as the text. Due to the same Chrome 14.0.833+ problem, this
still leaves the font looking somewhat jagged. It’s better than just
plain text, however.

Next I tried a combined the two attempts above. This looks a little
bit better, but it bulks up the text as it essentially adds 2 pixels
to the thinkness of the text.

Lastly, I tried applying two text-shadows: text-shadow:#000 0 1px 1px,#000 0 -1px 1px > > where #000 is the color of the text. What this does is
apply two text shadows, one of which is pushed down a little and the
other pushed up. This way, the text shadow covers the jagged edges. It
bulks up the text a little but definitely smooths it out.

Depending on the size of your text, different methods work. Smaller
(but still jagged) text could use the text-shadow, larger text could
use the shadow/stroke method, and very large text could use the
dual-shadow method. Of course the larger the text the less noticeable
the extra few pixels become. You can see all the different methods
here