Lousy Font Rendering in Camino

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 6:27 am

Ok, I've seen this before in Camino, but no one's really had any clear answer up to now - At ImageShack I've uploaded a shot of text from Camino's support page,

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/2221/samples9jj.jpg

rendered in Camino, Safari, Shiira, and Omniweb. As you can see, three out of four browsers are pretty consistent. But Camino's text rendering SUCKS!!

Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a font setting I missed? Any help would be appreciated.

krmathis · Post by **krmathis** » February 15th, 2006, 6:37 am

How did you get the text to render so ugly?

This is what it looks like in Camino 1.0 on my Mac OS 10.4.5 system.
http://www.caminobrowser.org/support/

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 6:40 am

I suppose it could be the font I'm using - but it _does_ show up clearly on the other browsers. AFAIK I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. :roll:

brutal · Post by **brutal** » February 15th, 2006, 6:51 am

Maybe Camino has a built in Anti-All-Caps-Impact-font-blocker to save peoples eyesight?

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 6:53 am

Yeah, there we go....

Uncle Asad · Post by **Uncle Asad** » February 15th, 2006, 9:04 am

There are issues with bold and certain fonts (esp. on 10.4, iirc) in Gecko in general, so this might be one of them. The future switch to Cairo/CoreGraphics should clear them up.

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 9:24 am

I thought it might have something to do with Gecko. They're switching engines? Hadn't heard that. Any idea when?

aanhorn · Post by **aanhorn** » February 15th, 2006, 9:44 am

I've noticed this too. One some websites, like macupdate.com, some text is crisp in Safari etc. and blurred out in Camino.

ldub · Post by **ldub** » February 15th, 2006, 10:35 am

Yeah, I just noticed this this morning when I went to Apple's support discussions forum. The font is pretty nasty.

perardi · Post by **perardi** » February 15th, 2006, 10:53 am

riven2000 wrote:I thought it might have something to do with Gecko. They're switching engines? Hadn't heard that. Any idea when?

Nah, they're not switching rendering engines. Cairo is, well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_%28graphics%29

It's a cross-platform graphics layer that will be used on upcoming Gecko-based browsers. It'll replace the hoary old Carbon/ATSUI/cruft left over from way back when that Camino, as well as Firefox, still uses.

I think that's what's going on, correct?

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 11:08 am

Cool. Either way, hopefully it'll do some good.

aanhorn · Post by **aanhorn** » February 15th, 2006, 11:20 am

I also heard - once Camino leaves Carbon behind, that scrollwheel sensitivity/smoothscroll will be on par with Safari finally. Anyone know anything about this?

aptenergy · Post by **aptenergy** » February 15th, 2006, 12:43 pm

riven2000, does the same thing happen in Firefox?

riven2000 · Post by **riven2000** » February 15th, 2006, 1:04 pm

It's been awhile since I used it on the Mac, but I believe so. Pretty much all the Gecko-based browsers do that on my machine. That's why I'm now looking at Shiira and Omniweb (still don't like that $29.95 price tag though).

coldforge · Post by **coldforge** » February 15th, 2006, 2:14 pm

Basically, Camino/Gecko has trouble rendering nearly any font aside from the system-default ones, like Georgia or Baskerville. Many fonts it will not render at all, instead simply rendering the text in Lucida Grande—then others, like the one you've got there, it will render alright, BUT: rich styles, like bolding and italic, do not actually use the bold/italic face of the font, but rather take the default face and make it thicker/slant it. Thus they almost always look like crap. There's not much to be done until the switch (if the switch will in fact fix things), but to stick to the fonts that come with your machine.