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

I think most people wouldn't use this property to make text more legible.
WebKit and most likely all other browsers will drop subpixel anti-aliasing
when a block of text is animated on the GPU. This causes a notable shift in
the text's appearance which is not desired. This is especially obvious with
transitions.

Rik

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 9:03 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:

>
> Rik Cabanier wrote:
>
> > Why a vendor prefix?
> > I think there are designers that care about this on all browser
> platforms.
>
> We're adding this to work around a specific, OSX problem that occurs
> with light text on dark backgrounds.  This is what '-webkit-font-smoothing'
> is primarily used for now.
>
> I don't think specifying and adding a general "font-smoothing"
> property is either a good idea or possible in practice.  The use of
> subpixel anti-aliasing is really a user preference and the range of
> possible text renderings across platforms makes defining property
> values that have consistent meaning close to impossible.
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Jul/0530.html
>
> > As an aside, this request seemed to originate from a user request to
> > turn sub-pixel aliasing off for icon fonts. Couldn't you detect that
> > a glyph is an icon and then turn off subpixel AA? I was under the
> > impression that there were different categories of glyphs...
>
> It's not just icon fonts, it's light text on dark backgrounds in
> general. Icon fonts just happen to be especially bad because they're
> designed as graphics not as letterforms intended to be legible at
> small sizes.
>
> There's no well-defined way to detect icon fonts.  From a browser
> viewpoint, a glyph is a glyph, there's no distinction between a
> letterform vs. an icon.
>
> John Daggett
>
>