DISQUS

DISQUS Hello!  The comments on this profile are unclaimed and thus are unverified.

Do they belong to you? Claim these comments.

Robert O'Callahan's picture

Unregistered

Feeds

aliases

  • Robert O'Callahan

Robert O'Callahan

6 months ago

in Browsers War – Text Rendering on Graphic Rating
Firefox honours the system Cleartype setting, IE doesn't. That probably explains most of the differences you see between IE and Firefox. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me to ignore the user's preferences.

I'm sad that you didn't do enough testing to notice that Firefox supports ligatures and kerning but the other browsers don't.
1 reply
Andy Gongea Thanks for telling me that Robert. You are right about ligatures and kerning - sorry for that glitch -, although the test was a little more generic than specific.

8 months ago

in Improved Browser Paint Events Bookmarklet on tlrobinson.net / blog

Actually, it's your bug not mine :-). The boundingClientRect/clientRects are relative to the viewport, but your abs-pos elements are relative to the scrolled top of the document. Make them position:fixed instead.

8 months ago

in Improved Browser Paint Events Bookmarklet on tlrobinson.net / blog

Nice! But I just noticed that I'm not giving you the right coordinates when the viewport is scrolled down. I'll fix that :-)

1 year ago

in Help me help you keep track of more meetings on dria
Can't we just have those meetings in a Google Calendar and pull from there, like the Mozilla Developer's Calendar?
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=pdighg...

That would make it really easy for people with various calendar apps to stay up to date.

2 years ago

in Font Rendering Across Rich Platforms on fortes.com
I'm one of the developers working to improve text rendering in Firefox. We've been told by Microsoft developers that there are actually three different levels of text rendering quality on Windows:
1) Cleartype with "compatible widths". What you currently get on XP. Probably what you're seeing in your Firefox screenshot. This mode doesn't allow Cleartype hinting to change glyph advance widths, to preserve exact layout compatibility with older Windows versions.
2) Cleartype with "natural widths". GDI apps can apparently turn this on and allow Cleartype hinting to change advance widths. This should help a lot but we haven't found out how to turn this on yet.
3) WPF. This is better than GDI apps can get because it offers subpixel positioning (GDI APIs can't deal with fractional pixel advances) and WPF antialiases in the vertical direction and the above options don't.
Slightly more discussion on my blog:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/200...

We can't make Firefox a WPF app so it looks like option 2 is the best we can do for the immediate future on Windows. At some point we may have to embed our own font rasterizer to get around this problem. It's too bad because our upper-level code supports subpixel positioning and antialiasing just fine (in the new code we've written for Firefox 3): those features work fine on Mac and Linux. So for now if you want to see what Firefox can do text-wise, try it on something other than Windows :-).
Returning? Login