Yet another reason I block everyone's webfonts.

(Designers on OS X: ClearType does not render fonts the same way.)

That seems excessive, perhaps just upgrade to a more progressive font-smoothing algorithm? ClearType is built for lo-res displays (it snaps pixels to a grid rather than smoothing), so as you'd expect it looks like utter crap on a nice monitor. I have heard good things about gditray:

http://www.cobyx.com/software/gdi/

Have to design for the lowest common denominator. Just because you and I can install gditray or whatnot doesn't mean that most people will.

Edit: The link even says that it doesn't work with Chrome, so it's still a non-starter.

Chrome should have DirectWrite rendering soon: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...

Is there an easy way to detect when type is rendered with ClearText?

This article explains and provides an implementation to do that: http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2009/11/29/how-to-detect-fo...

Most webfonts look OK on windows vista and up.

This is probably the 4th or 5th link this week that has been barely legible (windows 7/chrome). Note to blog authors who want to use custom webfonts: If you are not testing on non-IE windows, you could be alienating a very large percentage of your potential readerbase.

TypeKit (I don't know the name of the font). It looks fine on IE9. DRM'ed webfonts look like crap on all other browsers on Windows.

Yep. Chrome on Windows 7 looks awful.

The digits are especially confusing - the 4's render like European 1's.

What's the difference between European and non-European 1's?

Americans either write a single vertical stroke or an upward hook with a horizontal base line. Europeans (well, Germans and Hungarians to my own knowledge) write just the upward hook - to distinguish this from a 7, they cross the seven.

This font rendered fours (Chrome on Win 7) without the horizontal bar, leaving something that looked like a 1, to me.