If you regularly use both a Mac and a PC—and even if you aren’t a typography geek—you will notice how fonts often appear spindly on Windows in comparison to what you’re accustomed to on OSX.
Since a lot of my research is conducted on Windows 7 box, I spend a lot of time staring at these fonts. I have actually paid real US dollars for several fonts (Monotype Bembo, Minion Pro, etc.), so I naturally want these to look great wherever I use them. Today, I finally felt enough friction to look for a solution.
The first thing I tried was the ClearType Text Tuner, found under Control Panel > Display. This did not produce a noticeable difference.
Then, I began poking around on Google. A thread on SuperUser led to a neat tool called gdipp. From its website:
The gdipp (codename) project is a replacement of the Windows text render [sic], which brings to you the effect of text like Mac OS and Linux distributions. It is easy to use with ignorable overhead, and it is fully customizable.
I downloaded gdipp and installed it with defaults. I could tell an immediate difference on my own website in Chrome (which uses custom typography via Typekit). I A/B-tested the site on OSX and Windows, and I can finally say that I can’t tell a difference in quality of font rendering.
Get it here: http://code.google.com/p/gdipp/