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

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:07 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> Rik Cabanier wrote:
>>
>> > I think most people wouldn't use this property to make text more
>> legible.
>>
>> There's a *huge* volume of pages surrounding the use of
>> '-webkit-font-smoothing', some insightful, some inane, but the bottom
>> line is that authors are using this to work around a deficiency of OSX
>> text rendering.  Not sure why you're asserting that it won't be used
>> to make text more legible.
>>
>
> I'm sure some will, but I believe that will be the minority.
> On non-OSX platforms likely no one will since the font rendering is better
> there.
>
>
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> There are all sorts of conditions under which either a user agent or
>> the underlying OS will disable subpixel antialiasing.  I think the
>> shift you're seeing is more an implementation deficiency rather than
>> something that needs addressing via an explicit property.
>>
>
> Sure, but it's not something that will ever be fixed. (In fact, browsers
> are converging on this behavior)
> So, authors that care about smooth transitions are going to want to this
> property. If we don't give them this ability, they will simply push all
> text to GPU accelerated layers which makes things slow and use more memory.
>

See the comments section in
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/ where
designers are discussing doing this:

" I had found that touching that instance of the font with translate3d() in
css would "fix" it (eg. make it look nice again), but that was just an
observation and not a real fix."

"I have a case where one app I'm building has lots of fades and CSS3-based
animations. Nothing over-the-top, just some nice progressive enhancements.
In WebKit, animating stuff with CSS3 turns antialiasing on, so I've had to
resort to turning antialiasing on across the app, simply because the text
switches to antialiased when it animates and it looks bad. ..."