Most notably, to my eye, the text on the right has unappealing kerning changes.
A concrete example, visible in the screen-shot you linked: look at the words "little three" at the top right of the second paragraph. In the original rendering, the space between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair is correct. In the modified rendering on the right, there is an excess pixel between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair.
Uneven spacing of letters is one of the reasons I am unhappy when I use Chrome, since it still doesn't support DirectWrite on Windows [1].
[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
Both of these have the horrible rainbow effects around the edges of the letters, presumably from sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
But I'm an outlier, basically the only way I can read text without serious eyestrain is aliased with good hinting. Somehow the "jaggies" which so distress most people are completely innocuous for me, while I can't tolerate any of the fuzzy/blurry look that most readers bizarrely call "sharp".
> The Font Combiner application uses a couple of different techniques to overhaul fonts. All glyph forms are extracted from vectors present in the original fonts and scaled to size where appropriate, the vertical metrics are recalculated from scratch, and spacing and fresh automated hinting are applied to the result.
Now, I don't know a lot about the gory details of typography, but I do know that type designers spend a lot of time thinking about things like "appropriate size and scale" and other metrics. Can these really be automatically recalculated from scratch and how can this possibly lead to a better result?
Do most people really see any difference?
And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do.
Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering.
edit: relevant links
http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08 (27 minutes in for stripping hints on non-windows requests)
http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline-your-w...
If you don't see any difference think about how many people are viewing your app/site on windows machines and having to look at the horrible default rendering.
You can always tell when a site is build with Apple and not throughout tested on Windows, the fonts are always horrible, and there are very few tested services that render fonts across OS/browsers the right way, so this is a great idea.
Fortunately, I enforce my own fonts on web pages, as I cannot stand the incredibly poor quality of most "web fonts". Proper hinting makes a world of difference for reading on a screen. If you really care for typography on your website, you should pay for a decent font, or use a common system font.
Hinting and vertical metrics are quite the rabbit hole across platforms. This is a good article http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...
Font kerning is very new to web browsers. So far as I'm aware neither of the fonts demonstrated at the top of the post contain kerning information. The heavy fonts lower down do.
Font Combiner itself is still very new. Tracking or character spacing (as opposed to kerning) may benefit from some additional tweaks for OSX. This is outside of the scope of the current UI.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features [2] Check nodebox.github.io/opentype.js/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459778)
This is a screenshot showing Windows 7 and Chrome 30: http://i.imgur.com/WBbUIFi.png
Viewing them again on Chrome/Win7, the ones served by Font Combiner seem to have much better hinting.
I don't see any differences.
