- From: Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:31:09 -0500
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com>wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:
> > As an aside: the font stroke (the outline around each letter) in the
> above
> > clip helps readability substantially. A solid font color always tends to
> > blend into the background in places, where a two-color stroked font
> provides
> > its own contrast. I've used the same thing in game UIs rendered on top
> of a
> > moving background. Tangental, but I figured I'd point it out.
>
> Right now, the WebVTT spec handles this by writing the text in white
> on top of a partially-transparent black background. The text thus
> never has contrast troubles, at the cost of a dark block covering up
> part of the display.
>
> Stroking text is easy, though. Webkit has an experimental property
> for doing it directly. Using existing CSS, it's easy to adapt
> text-shadow to produce a good outline - just make four shadows, offset
> by 1px in each direction, and you're good.
>
That's a good one to know. Note that using only four shadows works poorly
for some glyphs, whether cardinals or diagonals are used; 8 shadows are
needed in practice.
For anyone stumbling here from a search, the following seems to work well
with various fonts at any font size, at least in Firefox:
text-shadow:
+0.02em 0.00em 0.02em #4495a9,
-0.02em 0.00em 0.02em #4495a9,
0.00em +0.02em 0.02em #4495a9,
0.00em -0.02em 0.02em #4495a9,
+0.02em +0.02em 0.02em #4495a9,
+0.02em -0.02em 0.02em #4495a9,
-0.02em +0.02em 0.02em #4495a9,
-0.02em -0.02em 0.02em #4495a9;
--
Glenn Maynard
Received on Monday, 24 January 2011 17:31:09 UTC