Re: A property for font antialiasing control on Mac OS X

On Wednesday 2013-07-17 17:04 -0700, Rik Cabanier wrote:
> Other cases where you might want to turn off anti-aliasing:
> - animations
> when animating text, you don't want to anti-alias because of performance
> and also because subpixel AA will cause "jiggling" of characters when you
> move a text run

The jiggling is a result of subpixel *positioning* of text (which
also requires re-rasterizing for the different subpixel positions,
which integer shifts don't).  I think that's independent of
antialiasing.

> - content that will end up in a 3d transform

Implementations already know how to disable subpixel AA here;
authors don't need to give hints.

> - match canvas text
> Text in canvas never uses subpixel-AA (although there are some browsers
> that allow it) and an author might want to match HTML text with Canvas text

I don't think this is a strong use case.

> Maybe for background-clip you might want the text to be a hard clip and not
> antialiased?

I don't think antialiasing of text will ever cause it to extend
outside a clip that it's in.

> Because of transition, animations and 3d transform, I don't believe that
> this will be a temporary solution (unless of course display technology
> advances so much that subpixel-AA is no longer needed)

I think in the long run, as display densities increase, we may well
be moving towards subpixel AA no longer being needed.  But that's
probably a long ways off.  I don't think your other examples are use
cases for author control (nor have I heard of such author control
ever being provided on platforms other than Mac).

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂

Received on Thursday, 18 July 2013 00:59:05 UTC