Re: Possible text-shadow enhancements

About the lineJoin, I have added a simple select to choose its effect
between what canvas currently allows:
http://www.fruitsofts.com/testcases/canvas_text-shadow.htm
You will see that there are a few visual artefacts with "miter" and
some fonts, whatever browser you use.

I feel that having non-rounded joins is not a priority here, as it
would be used less often. Also:
- it seems more complex than rounded corners to implement correctly
- it would need specific syntax
- most of the times, if font-size is not too big, the difference is
not very significant

Same goes for inset, while it can allow nice effects, it is mainly
useful with big fonts, and it may be much more complex to implement.

I don't mean those two are useless, I'd like to have them too, but
they can still be added later to the syntax.

On the other hand, spread-radius seems "simple" enough to implement
(well, from the pov of a web developer, not a browser developer ;),
and it would allow a wide range of new effects available immediately.

Same goes, or even more so, with foreground-color. There are a wide
range of effects, like using identical colors for text and background,
and using the shadow(s) to make the stuff readable, that we web
developers currently *cannot* safely use, because of the risk of the
UA not supporting text-shadow, thus making the text invisible.
The mere ability to specify a foreground color in the same rule as
text-shadow would just solve this, so to me this is the biggest
priority here. The faster browsers implement this, the faster we can
fully benefit from text-shadow.

Regards,

Jordan Osete

2011/3/2 Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>:
> On Mar 2, 2011, at 11:41 AM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Regarding Brad's samples...
>    http://www.bradclicks.com/cssplay/text-shadows.png
> I'm curious which, if any, of the shape modification effects is literally
> equivalent to just using a larger font size.  For non-blurred text-shadow a
> spread that simply does "grow the font size" might be significantly cheaper
> on some platforms and yield most of the desired result.  Such an approach is
> also interesting in that it allows font authoring to have some control in
> how text-shadow is applied.
>
> No, that wouldn't look right and wouldnt be close to the same at all, even
> if you adjusted the space between letters to make the length of the line of
> text the same. To get a 1px character stroke to be 3px wide (as it would be
> with a 1px spread), you'd have to triple the font-size (or close to triple).
> I think it would be pretty awful, honestly. And if you didn't adjust the
> spacing, the length of the shadow would get ridiculously long for longer
> runs of text.

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2011 21:31:47 UTC