This bug is also in Radar as <rdar://4578554> Bold text at Google and some other sites is extra-bold on one of my two computers. See attached picture. This occurred earlier just after we added support for synthetic bold, but broke again recently. The earlier bug and fix were in Bugzilla as http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6146 The font that's causing this problem is attached. If I disable this font in Font Book and relaunch Safari, the problem goes away. Since the symptoms are exactly the same as before, it seems like recent changes in the font code broke or removed the earlier fix.
Created attachment 8772 [details] picture showing extra-bold text at Google
Created attachment 8773 [details] One font that causes this problem
*** Bug 9534 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I installed the font and was unable to reproduce any problem at Google even after setting my default font to Arial. I'd love to fix this but I need steps to reproduce.
The code originally added to fix this bug is still in the tree, albeit in a new location. John, maybe we can work together on this if you can reproduce it.
(In reply to comment #4) > I installed the font and was unable to reproduce any problem at Google Darin, could you reproduce bug 9534? I'm not entirely convinced it is a duplicate of this one.
I couldn't reproduce either.
I'm not seeing this anymore either with tip of tree WebKit. Apparently it was fixed by some other change.
Technically a Google bug.