licentious radio

Thursday, June 20, 2002
[10:23:40 AM]

I was excited to try out Macintosh OS X's new text rendering (in 10.1.5). BAD MOVE. Don't do it! Apple screws us again.

zeldman [zeldman.com]: "In these applications, font smoothing is on at all sizes, regardless of user preferences. Smoothing throws off spacing, adversely affecting web layouts. Quartz font metrics mess up the rendering of Type 1 fonts. There are additional problems and trade-offs--enough to fill a book--but these are the highlights."

I (pathetically) hoped that the the new rendering would improve readability. I noticed that Mozilla supports the CSS2 feature that lets a stylesheet adjust the letterspacing. I wanted to add a little space between letters, and subtract a little space between words. Unfortunately, the Quartz rendering is too horrible for words. And now there's no (reasonable) way to go back.

Spare yourselves.

[By the way, the space hacking is plausible because I set the 19-inch monitor for 1600x1200, shrank the display size to the minimum, set the pixels per inch in Mozilla to 120, and used *points* for sizing. This combination lets text that is 1/6-inch high on the monitor (12 points) have 20+ pixels vertically. This starts to be enough pixels to render text well, but alas the rendering is wretched because of Apple's upgrade.]

[9:41:03 AM]
Wow. "But (seeking permission [to link]) is a matter of respect and honor for what we're trying to do here." Wrong. Linking is a matter of respect and honor. Demanding permission is disrespect, dishonor, and an assault on the value of the internet.