Comments on: textorize: Pristine Font rendering for the Web

By: RagImmado

RagImmado — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:35:09 +0000

http://www.sportsbettingchamp.com/images/sbacct1.jpg

I’ve been a guest of this discussion community for for quite a while but finally got around to making it official and registering!

A couple of weeks ago, I found a great post on the board about techniques for sportsbetting.

Anyway, I can’t seem to find the original discussion thread is located, but I thought to comment and say that DailySportsCash.com Sports Betting site is the best out of all the options mentioned.

By: textorize: Pristine Font rendering for the Web | web non-sense : blog on web design, photography, music and jeeps

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:45:10 +0000

[...] Visit: textorize: Pristine Font rendering for the Web [...]

By: Abba Bryant

Abba Bryant — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:22:26 +0000

{
background: url(heading.png);
width: 122px;
height: 43px;
}

By: Abba Bryant

Abba Bryant — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:21:32 +0000

I have Ruby 1.8.7 installed, not the default OS X package.

I installed RubyCocoa from source and that went fine, the errors mentioned earlier went away and it seemed to work alright except the only output I get is…

{
background: url(heading.png);
width: 122px;
height: 43px;
}

Or similiar. I don’t see a window with a graphic and no file is saved anywhere. Specifying an output path does nothing.

Anybody have any idea what isn’t working?

By: Scott B

Scott B — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:48:03 +0000

Let’s just drop Photoshop from the discussion. It’s roots are in print design and, though I haven’t used CS4, it still shows through CS3. It’s capabilities for screen media (i.e., the web) have never matured to the point that it is indispensable, as many an open source proponent will gladly, even exuberantly, corroborate.

A designer’s reliance on Photoshop is more a handicap than anything else – our dependence on it a barbed thorn.

As another commenter pointed out, the superior Adobe Creative Suite stablemate, Fireworks, has been a superior (paid) option since the long-lost Macromedia days. Photoshop (again, referring to CS3) is still clumsy in handling vector objects and downright maddening dealing with text. Not the least issue of which is the topic of this post.

I know what you’re thinking though, “I can’t stop using it.” Because if you already haven’t, there’s two compelling reasons why not: 1) It’s your sugar daddy/crutch. 2) Organizational imperative (typically due to team members using reason #1).

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:34:32 +0000

Pulled the latest gem using gemcutter, now I’m getting an error on the basic example – any thoughts?:
iMac:~ ryan$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [universal-darwin9.0]
iMac:~ ryan$ textorize -f”Gotham” -s200 Hello
/Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework/Resources/ruby/osx/objc/oc_wrapper.rb:50: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11) [universal-darwin9.0]

By: Thomas Fuchs

Thomas Fuchs — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:56:02 +0000

@David Yeah, for pages that are supposed to be printed I’d suggest using a print stylesheet and a font that’s available on all computers– the textorize stuff is designed to look good on screens.

One way to do it (needs tweaking for IE, tho) is to use the textorize-generated graphics as CSS background-image of an element, and using opacity:0 text in it, while the print stylesheet removes the background image and sets opacity to 1. This also makes the text selectable.

We use that technique on http://javascriptmasterclass.com/ (no print stylesheet tho, just text selection).

By: David

David — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:42:34 +0000

Ok I just tried it on an iphone. You’re right, it looks pretty good. You have to zoom in further than you typically would before it is noticeable.

Printing looks a bit weird, but ok.

By: Thomas Fuchs

Thomas Fuchs — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:07:09 +0000

@David I think that’s FUD. Actually try it! You’ll see that the zooming quality doesn’t matter (you’ll get bad quality with non-subpixel AA text too), but makes it much more readable and better looking in the default case.

Here are some further thoughts and applications for it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunstan/3994227166/ and http://typophile.com/node/60577.

By: David

David — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:03:43 +0000

Sorry Thomas, I’m going to add to the whining. This is really a bad idea.

What about page zooming and printing? I imagine the text gets pixelly and ugly and the coloured fringes would become visible.

Page zooming is especially important on devices like the iphone, where you are often zooming in to a higher than intended resolution.

I also agree with the previous issues about text selection, CRT and reverse-ordered colours.

I don’t think these are insignificant issues. The lower quality rendering of cufon and sifr is a lesser problem in my opinion.