

Textorize: Pristine Font rendering for the Web - ams1
http://mir.aculo.us/2009/09/29/textorize-pristine-font-rendering-for-the-web/

======
mquander
So the proposal is to prebuild subpixel-smoothed images of your text for the
web?

Not everyone can read subpixel rendering correctly (CRTs, LCDs with weird
subpixel orders, people with rotated screens.) You can't increase or decrease
the font size in your browser, and you can't wrap it on a smaller screen.
Plus, the text isn't selectable or searchable, which is a showstopper. That's
why things like sIFR exist.

What is the point? I completely disagree that this is pretty cool. This sucks
(compared to other solutions, including not doing it at all.) It is the
ultimate triumph of form over function. It is like something someone would
have suggested in 2001. If you want something cool, check out modern solutions
to this problem like Cufon, which generates fonts that can be rendered as real
text with Javascript.

That, or, you know, let the user decide how he wants to read your text instead
of trying to control every last pixel on his screen.

~~~
Maro
And all you need is a Mac, OSX, Ruby and some Ruby package, and then you can
have _really cool_ imagetexts on your relaxed ROR web app that you generate
from the command line! But it's on github!

~~~
tptacek
Content-free snark. You need OSX to generate the images. You obviously don't
need OSX or Rails to use them.

~~~
Maro
I'd say it was a humorous (if a bit sarcastic) one-line summary of a post to
save people time. Cheers!

------
ZeroGravitas
I was going to point out that the demo image is misleading because the Mac's
rendering would look better than Photoshop even without subpixel anti-aliasing
(which is plain stupid for the web, minimal gain with possibility of looking
much worse in certain circumstances) but I don't have to:

 _"Even when subpixel antialiasing is turned off (Appearance panel in System
Preferences), the rendered text still looks better than that from Photoshop,
Flash and JavaScript."_ \-- the author, in comments

This would allow transparent backgrounds too, which seems to be the number one
request. I'm guessing it would be fairly easy to replicate this cross platform
using the standard linux text rendering stack. Mac text rendering isn't really
about better technology, they just make different decsions.

Decisions that those used to Windows text rendering hate. I on the other hand
love it and set my Ubuntu boxes up the same way. I think this should be the
default on Ubuntu but people get really attached to the text rendering they
are used to.

~~~
mquander
Not to derail, but ZG, are you referring to a particular setting for the Mac
font rendering besides the subpixel thing in /etc/fonts/local.conf? I'm
setting up a Gentoo desktop and haven't used desktop Linux in some years, and
I'd love to have nicer-looking fonts. I turned on subpixel support, hinting,
and anti-aliasing, but things still look (imo) subpar to Mac font appearances.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You probably want to turn hinting _off_.

Hinting follows the Windows philosophy of moving the letters about so that
they fit the pixel grid better. Apple tries to leave them where they would be
on a fictional perfectly hi-res display (or printer) and applies anti-aliasing
where it doesn't fit the grid.

The former is _sharper_ but not true to the actual shapes, position and
kerning of letters and words, the latter is considered _blurry_ by some,
though less so as the DPI increases to iPhone levels.

Compare these Windows, OS X and Ubuntu screenshots I found on the internet:

[http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/sn...](http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/snapshot_fontwindows.png)

[http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/sn...](http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/snapshot_fontosx.png)

[http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/sn...](http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-
content/uploads/2007/07/snapshot_fontubuntu.png)

From this article:

[http://rewind.themasterplan.in/2007/07/15/sexy-smooth-
fonts-...](http://rewind.themasterplan.in/2007/07/15/sexy-smooth-fonts-on-
kubuntu/)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
And for those who want the opposite, for Ubuntu fonts to look just like
Windows XP:

<http://sharpfonts.com/>

------
surfmike
Another drawback of this approach is that the text will looked horrible on
CRTs. CRTs don't have the same pixel geometry as LCDs.

~~~
callahad
Nor do all LCDs have the same pixel arrangement.

------
zokier
The problem with OS X font rendering imho is that it produces heavier result
than anything else.

I made comparison picture, and noticed that Adobe Reader renders text bit
taller than others, but on the other hand it has imho best antialiasing.
<http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/5549/fontrendering.png>

(Samples are from Windows/Wordpad, Adobe Acrobat(using pdf printed from
Wordpad), Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop (sharp), in that order.)

~~~
moosecake
This is really just a design philosophy:
[http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-
philosophi...](http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-
of-windows-and-mac-os-x)

PDF (technically Quartz PDF) is the native format for OS X, so that may be
part of the reason why it seems like their text rendering attempts to mimic
print like this.

------
moosecake
"no text selection (IMHO a feature, not a bug)"

How is that a feature?

~~~
idm
Yeah - that's a pretty hard case to argue. I can imagine content-controlling
situations where you might think of that as a feature, but there are _other_
situations (most use cases, _IMHO_ ) where text selection is an expected
paradigm.

EDIT: that said, I do think this is a neat and worthy project.

------
there
...using images, for OS X only.

~~~
callmeed
Yeah, I don't really get the "for the web" in the title.

I need pristine font rendering _on my webserver_

~~~
natrius
There are several common serializations of images which can be saved to disk
and transferred to your web server as needed. If you need pristine _dynamic_
font rendering, OS X is equipped with networking functions that allow you to
send commands to the machine and receive the results back on your web server
with latency that is low enough for most purposes.

(I apologize for the facetiousness, but it was too fun to write for me to go
back and edit it now.)

------
rbanffy
Assumes my screen has the same RGB order and orientation as the Mac where the
images are generated.

Unacceptable.

------
whimsy
consistant->consistent

------
adamhowell
This won't generate much interest on HN, unfortunately, but this is pretty
cool -- most especially the subpixel antialisasing.

