Re: Text anti-aliasing on the Mac

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> Previously, Chrome had some properties that incidentally switched text
> to grayscale anti-aliasing, which people used to avoid this pop.  As
> well, some designers simply dislike the "fat text" effect that LCD
> anti-aliasing causes on Macs (particularly in their heading fonts,
> which looked bold on Mac but normal elsewhere), and so used these
> properties to switch to grayscale anti-aliasing in general.  Chrome 22
> changed the behavior of some of these properties so that they no
> longer switched the anti-aliasing to grayscale, which caused a lot of
> people to complain.  We're reverting this change for now, but we still
> have the unsolved problem of the "pop", and designer's general desire
> to avoid "fat text".
>
> So, I bring this to you, the WG.  How do Firefox and Opera deal with
> this?  (IE, you get a pass this time.)  Safari, any opinions?
>

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "this". We don't offer a supported
way to turn off subpixel AA (on any platform) and I'm not aware of any
clamor for it. I don't know why that is; maybe Web designers have bigger
complaints about our rendering, or maybe our support for subpixel
positioning and always-on text shaping mitigates the problem.

Rob
-- 
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your Father in heaven. ... If you love those
who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors
doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more
than others?" [Matthew 5:43-47]