Arvo, Puritan render poorly on Windows about googlefontdirectory HOT 3 CLOSED

The problem here is that ClearType and all forms of font smoothing appear to be 
disabled entirely. I understand that's fairly common on XP systems, but my 
understanding is that you have to go out of your way to override that setting 
on Vista and Windows 7. In any case, we do not explicitly tune the hints for 
non-smoothed rendering. That said, there are a few fonts that do as well as can 
be expected in such settings, especially PT Sans and PT Serif.

it is not exactly the same issue as the link you gave, because ClearType does 
appear to be enabled in the screenshot posted there.

After further research, I can confirm that this is ClearType-related but there 
are still some oddities here.

I tried downloading the Arvo and Puritan fonts from FontSquirrel and hosted 
them myself using the @font-face rules in the FontSquirrel-provided stylesheet. 
Interestingly, these seem to render slightly better in Windows 7 on my test 
machine(s) than their Google Font Directory-provided equivalents. (Baselines in 
the self-hosted Puritan line up correctly on my machine regardless of whether 
ClearType is enabled; if you look at the Bad_Windows.png which is using 
Google-hosted Puritan, the b's, d's, and u's stick out below the baseline.) Why 
would the fonts look better when I host them myself - is FontSquirrel providing 
a newer version?

My research also showed that having ClearType ENABLED could also cause fonts to 
be rendered poorly in Windows, which is what spurred the development of this 
jQuery plug-in: 
http://allcreatives.net/2009/12/05/jquery-plugin-ie-font-face-cleartype-fix/ I 
confirmed this myself; disabling ClearType causes both of the demo pages linked 
from the plug-in page to render identically and correctly.

FontSquirrel's generator regenerates the hinting using, if I recall, 
FontForge's autohinter.