Google Product Forums
Re: Problems with Chrome 18? Read this first.
david.king Mar 31, 2012 4:06 PM
Posted in group: Google Chrome Forum

Categories: Report an Issue and Get Troubleshooting Help :

13. Font rendering issues.

Chrome 18 seems to have introduced a new font rendering issue which is being tracked in the Chrome forum. Current solutions involve disabling any font rendering software (such as gdipp) that you have installed.

If you are seeing this issue on Windows and are using specific font rendering programs (ie. GDIPP, GDI++, MacType), please follow along on the issue here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113777. 

If you are on a Mac computer, follow along on this other issue: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=108645. 

Both issues are being investigated and the progress of the issue will be updated on the public issue tracker. If you would like to get updates on the issue progress, you can click the star next to the issue number.

Update: The issue has been marked as an external dependency (on Windows). 

According to the webkit updates, Chrome begin to use internal bitmap bitblt to accelerate GDI text rendering, which makes the shadow function of GDIPP and MacType invalid. Moreover, chrome begin to use GDI coordinate transformation to draw GDI text, this is what causes GDIPP to render incorrectly.

The new MacType now supports rendering of text on DCs which has transformation enabled, thus the text in Chrome can be smoothed as normal. You can test mactype from: http://mactype.googlecode.com.

Update 2: If you are experiencing this issue on Mac OS, please make sure that you update Chrome to the latest version. We just released an update specific only to Mac OS; the latest version is 18.0.1025.163.

If you are on Mac OS and continue to see this issue after you have updated to 18.0.1025.163, please let us know in this thread.