anti-alias, text smooting?

[ian_6500]

Hi, Originally, I laid out all of my text directly on the page (with a Mac) then discovered it looked really bad and jagged on most PC's I tested it on. So, I just turned all my text into images. Of course, that's a detriment for SEO. Is there a way I can lay out text and be 100% sure it will look great on any reasonably up-to-date PC? Even if "Clear Text" is not enabled? I want to use 14 pt type, Helvetica... Thanks!

[djr33]

Basically, it's not possible. Browsers render the fonts as they do, and PCs tend to not render it smoothly.
The only real option would be to consider using a font that works, but this means:
1. Creating/finding a suitable font that renders well on the PC (and looks similar enough to Helvetica).
2. Making each and every user install that font to their system.

So the only practical option is testing various fonts on a PC and finding which one(s) are acceptable (from the preinstalled fonts), then just using that.

You can use image for some of the titles, etc., just be sure you also have alt="text version" in all of the image tags-- that will be OK for SEO, though perhaps not quite as good as text.
But never put the main content of the page in images. This is just part of the web-- you're not designing an image, but a website, and websites aren't perfect.

I wish I had better advice. Maybe someone else will. This is a known problem, though.

[ian_6500]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Can you please give me more of an example of where alt="text version" goes in the image tags, and please show me an example? Thank you!

[djr33]

<img src="mytitle.jpg" alt="My Title">
Assuming that "mytitle.jpg" displays the text "My Title".

This makes the page accessible to, for example, screen readers (for those who cannot see the screen), text only browsers, and also search engines, all of which don't read images. Though it may be seen as more of a "label" than "content", it should still at the very least get that phrase in there for the search engine so it is associated with your page, but perhaps not as directly.

The alt text is what pops up when you hover over an image.