Why is Dreamweaver's (CS3) text seem "fuzzy"?

As far as I know, there is absolutely no CSS property that could do that… what OS, browser, fonts are you using?

Just a guess, but if you’re on a Mac and DW (for whatever reason) doesn’t use the default Mac font rendering, you could see a difference between it and your browser(s).

Here’s a screenshot of a test page in Dreamweaver (right), with it previewed in Safari (left) side by side: View Screenshot

And here’s a link to the actual test page where you can look at the code: View Test Page

As you’ll see, the text in Dreamweaver is much sharper and thinner, giving it an overall cleaner appearance. Thanks for all the help on a confusing issue for me.

@segdeha:

I have my font smoothing set on: Automatic and turned on for fonts 4 and higher.

If the web browser has font smoothing set on, that’s probably the cause of it. I’m pretty sure, for example, that Internet Explorer 7 has font smoothing on by default even if the rest of the computer has it turned off.

The code looks fine, there’s nothing special or wrong with it, the difference must lie on the font rendering method that’s used by Dreamweaver and Safari or whatever other browser you use. I don’t use Macs, so I really can’t say, but you might want to fine tune your font rendering settings.

Here’s a screenshot of the page you linked seen on Firefox 2 on Ubuntu Gutsy… looks fine to me.

Cool, thanks for all the feedback guys.