Is Windows even using the same font? I think Windows prioritizes making the text look sharp over getting all the character strokes in the right place. OS X and Ubuntu look very similar except for the line spacing, and the lowercase ‘a’, which looks kind of strange/vertically compressed on Ubuntu.

>I think Windows prioritizes making the text look sharp over getting all the character strokes in the right place.

Yup, pretty much. A trio of Spolsky/Atwood posts from 2007 worth reading:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/whats-wrong-with-ap...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

They should all be using Verdana, as per HN's CSS. I have the font installed in each OS so it should be a fair fight unless I screwed something different up.

The font in the Ubuntu image is not Verdana.

Ubuntu does not install Microsoft fonts by default. It will fallback to Ubuntu's default font.

I always have msttcorefonts installed which includes Verdana. It's part of the script that is the first thing I run on a new install...

(Like, a half hour ago, I checked that Verdana was installed and then recreated the screenshot from the original post and it's identical as far as I can tell.

The fonts are similar, but you can see the numeral "3" is different. They're not the same font.

Right-click the text and choose "Inspect element". In the right-hand column, make sure "Computed" is selected at the top, then look to see what font-family is being rendered. (If you click "Rules" at the top, you can see which rules are active.)

In my experience, this doesn't necessarily give the correct font. Some distros have font aliases in fontconfig. I've found that `fc-match` can easily find the true font being used for a given font name/pattern, e.g. fc-match monospace might give DejaVu Mono

Yeah, it says Verdana: http://i.imgur.com/50Sx6c3.png

The '3' doesn't look any more different than other chars due to rendering difference, to me.

And KDE's font manager's take on Verdana: http://i.imgur.com/4c5cSe3.png

And Firefox on my system, just as a reference: http://i.imgur.com/a2yZ7UQ.png

Thanks for double-checking. The 'a' looks very different on the Windows 7 sample!

Your right, my mistake. I verified with my ubuntu install. My Verdana looks the same as yours.

There are differences with how the text is rendered. Maybe it has to do with kerning and subpixel optimizations.