This is an Improvement?

smoothing all fonts is a horrible idea. entourage smoothes fonts and it's bloated looking. pixel fonts, and small web fonts were designed to be aliased to be clear on the screen. the aliasing looks sloppy.you shouldn't have font smoothing unless you want it! and if you are able to turn it off - the kerning should be correct. currently in can be messed up one place and correct another - in the same application! what is up?

This is what the text on your site looks like in Quartz using Silk with IE 5.1 (assuming the image link will work.)

I agree, type under 16-18 pt/px just isn't meant to be antialiased onscreen. I've never understood why people get excited about it. Can you still turn aa off for type under a certain size in OS X?

yeah, but it screws up the letter-spacing. it's a half-assed attempt, i think. perhaps with the overhaul of quartz in 10.2, a better text manager will come, too.

The most recent version of Chimera (the one that also takes advantage of 10.1.5's anti-aliasing engine) has the same problem as the new Mozilla Alpha. However, in the nightly builds of Mozilla, the spacing issues have been largely corrected. It's an evolutionary process and sometimes a step backward is taken, but I'm optimistic for the future.

Apparently, better kerning is available in Mozilla via Quarz, but it was not turned on for 1.1a. Chris (http://placenamehere.com/) tells me that it hs now been switched on in the trunk, with a minor performance hit during page rendering.

initially i excluded moz from the silk under it's global settings options. not satisfied after disabling silk, i decided to fiddle with the settings, by enabling 'text metrics', with the other options, the kerning has improved quite a bit. not sure of the performance hit though...

t+,

yeh, this type-smoothing that's going on in these browsers has my a bit stymied between going for it because i like the idea and not using it at all because the text is too fuzzy. i like the ugly pixels i guess.

-mat

I agree, the silk type looks terrible. A nice, clean font like Georgia now looks tight and squashed like Times - awful spacing or not.

It's not font smoothing per se, it's a deep change in font rendering, and it's bad news for designers.

As much as I prefer OS X to WinXP, I have to say that XP's new font smoothing technology is great by comparison.

So I downloaded the I.E. 5.2 update last night and took the new Quartz text smoothing engine for a spin and after about 30 minutes, decided that text smoothing on OS X sucks.

Appleís Quartz engineers donít have a clue.

Many of the fonts used for onscreen user interface today, were designed to look good on screen in aliased format. Anti-aliased versions of Verdana, Georgia and Geneva look horrible when rendered in Quartz. I can actually feel my eyes aching when I view 10 pt anti-aliased Verdana on screen. This will surely lead to a myopic Apple user base. Windows XP, by comparison, has done a knock-on job with onscreen text anti-aliasing. Verdana and Georgia look fantastic on I.E. 6 for Windows XP. Iíd call their technology ìsemi-anti-aliasingî as it doesnít blur the heck out of the entire type.

There are days like today, where I think that Apple needs a good shakeup. Someone needs to grab Jobs by the shoulders and shake him really hard, maybe even bitch-slap him. Apple is up to good things, but itís continuing to miss the boat on many other exceedingly more important things.

Human interface standards and user interface used to be Appleís claim to fame. Now itís known for gaudy brushed metal looking iApps and ìlickable iconsî.

Sheesh!

shawn

in OSX, you may choose what size (and above, in points) OSX should start to anti-alias. the highest setting is 12 points, unless this was changed recently and i'm not aware of it. i've got it at 12, and am pretty happy overall. but then, i'm neither a designer type nor particularly picky about typography, so...

Okay, so control how you want it done with the latest version (June 18th) of TinkerTool

http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool2.html

big deal...

The just-released IE 5.2 for Mac OS X (which is a bit faster in the page-rendering-department) has silk text-rendering turned on by default, but - thankfully - provides a checkbox for disabling the feature.

My ancient Lombard PowerBook screen looks bad enough with added blurring. C'mon apple, leave tricks like this to Microsoft and give us what we want: more speed.

Now can anyone tell me why, post-"upgrade," my fonts are all wonky in apps like Word?

The horror, the horror...worst part, I don't even know what to toggle, yell at, or de-install to improve matters...

I've never been a fan of anti-aliased text. However, when I ran Mozilla 1.1a on a flat panel iMac and surfed to http://www.webstandards.org/, I was stunned by how excellent everything looked! I immediately thought that the combination of CSS, Gecko, Mozilla, Quartz and Mac OS X displayed the web the way God intended.

In my informal tests, Mozilla is a lot better than IE 5.2's font smoothing.

I expect that as developers really figure out what they're doing, we'll see stunning displays in the future, especially with Mac OS X 10.2.

I'd turn that e-mail that Jeffrey Zeldman called a "doctoral thesis" into a Web page, but the situation would probably change before I got it done.

Anyway, this whole font smoothing situation got shaken up recently by Apple's decision to enable the Quartz font rendering in apps that use the old QuickDraw graphics calls. You can turn on various things independently, and two of the things are the rendering itself, and the metrics necessary to make the spacing not look drunken. But if you turn on the latter, it both causes a speed hit and messes up PostScript Type 1 fonts. So some developers don't, which makes everything look wobbly.

That's the executive summary.

Maybe it's just me, but this site always looks fine with I visit.

I'm running 10.1.5, Mozilla 1.1a, Slick, and TinkerTool (text metrics on in Quartz).

The Georgia font is a mite "soft" but is a real pleasure to read.