Anti-aliasing Japanese text on Windows 7?

Question

On most websites that display Japanese text, it does not appear anti-aliased in my browser, while Latin text of course does. Kanji is universally anti-aliased, which is somewhat understandable, but hiragana is not. This is only an issue on Windows - the Mac has much better & native font anti-aliasing which seems to work well regardless of the alphabet. Is there something on my end that I can do to fix this? And is there a way to ensure a website of my own creation displays anti-aliased Japanese text?

Answer 1

Japanese text … does not appear anti-aliased in my browser

Windows doesn't anti-alias fonts below a certain size - I believe this is font specific. Try a different font or try increasing the text size (Ctrl++ in many browsers)

is there a way to ensure a website of my own creation displays anti-aliased Japanese text?

There is no sensible way to achieve this. Your website might be viewed by PCs running a variety of different operating systems with a variety of browsers. Consider phones, pads, tablets, netbooks, TVs and other hardware platforms.

You could pre-render the text as graphics images but this is troublesome to achieve in a way that is readable on both phones and dual-24" screens. It also means your text won't get indexed by search engines and so is likely to rank lower in searches.

Your could use Flash but many of the same disadvantages apply. Not all platforms support Flash and some people disable it.

Answer 2

The thing is that old Japanese fonts have bitmapped version at small sizes (typically less than 22 or 23pt), so they're almost always never anti-aliased. They were designed at the time when subpixel rendering was still generally not a thing. The only built-in font that's bitmap-free is the new Meiryo family which was designed specifically for ClearType so it appears good in every sizes

You can try following this tutorial MSゴシックとMS明朝で、ClearTypeを有効にする to strip all the bitmaps in the font to make Windows does the anti-aliasing for small point sizes. Here is the steps to do that

Or using an alternative Windows font renderer like this one

Both have pros and cons. Stripping out bitmap characters as the former solution will make ClearType effective in every application, but maybe you can't do that with every font. With the latter you can configure the rendering for your preference, but it may not work properly on some programs which use DirectWrite to render text [update: DirectWrite support is better now]