Calling all firefox users. Do your fonts look faint and washed out?

[dorayme]

An XP laptop?

Why not just dual boot XP on the one you have?

Don't know how to do this or what it involves. Thought to buy my way out
of it and notch up a tax deduction to stop the accountant saying I am so
mean and don't have enough deductions for her to play with. And take my
time transferring all the software to the laptop.

Where would you suggest I go to get algorithmic instructions for your
suggestions. I have two hard disks in my winbox, one of which has 2000
on it. The other is not doing much, it was spare so I threw it in one
day for storage.

on a Mac (God, I hope this does not make Ed go ballistic at me a
again... <g>)it is quite straightforward to have a number of OS's on
separate volumes and you can choose what to boot from. When I talk to
windows friends, they say it is not quite so easy (on older machines at
least) to do this with Windows.

 

[Ben C]

If Apple is so all-knowing and wonderful, how come Safari for Windows
looks so ... well, poopy?

I heard the reason for that is that Apple built the font rendering into
Safari for Windows instead of using the native Windows stuff.

Either it looks poopy out of context or perhaps it doesn't work as well
with the fonts that come with Windows which expect Windows-style
hinting, or perhaps something got left behind when they ported it to
Windows.

The main difference is that in Safari for Windows the fonts do more
anti-aliasing and less hinting.

The problem is when some part of a glyph doesn't hit a pixel boundary.
Either you anti-aliase it (basically make it partly transparent at that
point) which is easy to do because it's automatic; or you slightly alter
the shape of the glyph at smaller point sizes so it hits the pixel
boundaries better. The second approach is "hinting" and takes a lot of
work because font designers have to manually design the hints for each
glyph.

Windows fonts use quite a lot of hinting, which is why the glyphs look
sharp, but perhaps a bit boxy at small point sizes. Open Source
developers have less time and inclination to spend on things like
designing font-hints so they rely more on one-size-fits-all
anti-aliasing.

I don't know exactly where Apple got their font code from-- whether they
just helped themselves to some code from Free BSD or whether they have
tried to differentiate. Usually their strategy is to spend their own
money on the eye candy and so you might think they'd see fonts as
something worth investing in. Probably Safari does look better on a Mac
than on Windows, but I don't have either kind of system to compare.

 

[dorayme]

I heard the reason for that is that Apple built the font rendering into
Safari for Windows instead of using the native Windows stuff.

Either it looks poopy out of context or perhaps it doesn't work as well
with the fonts that come with Windows which expect Windows-style
hinting, or perhaps something got left behind when they ported it to
Windows.

The main difference is that in Safari for Windows the fonts do more
anti-aliasing and less hinting.

The problem is when some part of a glyph doesn't hit a pixel boundary.
Either you anti-aliase it (basically make it partly transparent at that
point) which is easy to do because it's automatic; or you slightly alter
the shape of the glyph at smaller point sizes so it hits the pixel
boundaries better. The second approach is "hinting" and takes a lot of
work because font designers have to manually design the hints for each
glyph.

Windows fonts use quite a lot of hinting, which is why the glyphs look
sharp, but perhaps a bit boxy at small point sizes. Open Source
developers have less time and inclination to spend on things like
designing font-hints so they rely more on one-size-fits-all
anti-aliasing.

I don't know exactly where Apple got their font code from-- whether they
just helped themselves to some code from Free BSD or whether they have
tried to differentiate. Usually their strategy is to spend their own
money on the eye candy and so you might think they'd see fonts as
something worth investing in. Probably Safari does look better on a Mac
than on Windows, but I don't have either kind of system to compare.

Interesting.

Mac X seems to have put serious efforts into font rendering. I know that
even in older versions of BBEdit and Mac browsers run under OS 9, text
look more splotchy to my eyes now. There is a lot of mental adjustment
to what one uses regularly and it can come as a surprise when changing.
This is well known by spectacular experiments in field studies of groups
given special spectacles to wear.

However, the leap in quality was apparent to me very early in my change
to X.

 

[Mike Barnard]

Don't, however, go anywhere near Vista.

Yoohoo. I'm still hanging around like a bad smell.

FWIW I agree.

I bought and installed Vista ultimate on my current, homebuilt pc [1]
about a year ago. It had all the eye candy, but ran like a dog and
took soooo long to do anything.

Drivers have been an issue but with a years development time they
*should* be getting there.

My real gripe is the digital rights issues thet MS have built in. See
this...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/vista_drm_analysis/

and this...

http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html


and... no, no. Thats enough, you get the message.

Anyway, one reformat and install of XP pro and I'm happy. Mostly.


[1] A high spec gaming pc paid for with some of my retirement lump
sum.

 

[dorayme]

OTOH why not simply upgrade. It's the same OS, simply an upgrade. IIRC 2000
identifies itself as Windows NT version 5.0. XP is Windows version 5.1.

Because the XP I have will not upgrade the 2000, it will install fresh
but... don't want to spend ages on reconfiguring and reinstalling
software and everything just now...

Reminder, I have two hard disks in there, one doing bugger all really.
What is the worst that could happen if I stick in the XP install CD and
tell it to install on the spare HD, the one that is not the boot disk,
the one without the 2000 on it?