Hiya Elli,
I see 4 obvious ways out to the problem. You may feel uncomfortable with all of
them but they could help you get a conceptual grip on how to deal with the
situation as a thought exercise.
1) Install FontForge (open source and free to use), open up the font in
question, and through a system of trial and error, tweak the glyph outlines
such that you have a version which appears under Windows ClearType as the
original does under Mac OS X (you may have to play with resolution-dependent
hinting settings — don't know how to do that, but it's certainly possible using
free software). Once the new font achieves the desired effect, save it with a
different name and put it through FontSquirrels @font-face generator or
onlinefontconverter.com to get multiple formats. Then in your markup, insert
the following code in the head:
<script>
(function(c){
if(navigator.platform.indexOf('Win')===0)
c(c()+' windows';
}(function(c){
var h = document.lastChild;
return c ? h.className = c : h.className;
}));
</script>
Then change your CSS to feature special rules pointing Windows users to the new
font:
html.windows body {
font-family: newfont, oldfont, etc;
}
The obvious disadvantages here are the unknown amount of discovery work
necessary to competently create the new font and the JavaScript dependency in
handing the right rules to the right users. Obviously you may have nowhere near
the time to contemplate this.
2) Rely on the JS and CSS technique exemplified above to make the windows
operating system identifiable in your stylesheets, but simply change the font
colour's relative lightness and saturation to darker/stronger for Windows
users, giving the optical impression that both rasterising systems display the
glyphs with equivalent weight.
3) Decide that the font in question, as with many, simply doesn't reliably
cater for common use cases, and resolve to find a similar one with better
cross-browser display parity (or throw the baby out with the bathwater, take
the site back to the design phase, and choose an unrelated font that fits the
technical requirements).
4) Accept that font-rendering APIs will always differ, and that there is only
so much you should be prepared to do to compensate for OS' disparities; also
bearing in mind that there are no credible user personas who fire up Windows
and Mac to make sure their experience of a site has bitmap parity across
platforms, decide that the results on both platforms are independently
acceptable, and it is not a web developer's job to fix fonts or operating
systems.
I would describe this as a question of professional philosophy, but then I am
incredibly pretentious ;)
Regards,
Barney Carroll
(+44) 742 9177 278
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