But isn't Firefox displaying anti-aliased text, so it only displays "graymaps"? In that case, if you've embedded black and white bitmaps, they'd never be called.

Jason C

It's not just Firefox's decision...

BTW, how are you embedding the bitmaps?

hhp

Kerning is not supported cross browser yet, so (for a useable webfont) you'll just have to wait that one out. As for the embedded bitmaps: as far as I know they're not supported by any relevant browsers. What you want to do is fix Windows' poor rendering right? Embedded bitmaps is not the way to go.

Windows rendering is only poor with fonts that ignore reality.
OSX rendering is poor even with the best fonts.

hhp

There's fuzzy Mac poor and there's Windows old unreadable-as-the-letter-it-is-supposed-to-be poor. The only redemption for the former is time and "regularized" design.

The best Windows rendering is impossible to achieve in OSX.
There's no redemption for a platform that hasn't cared about
typography in a long time. Chalkboard? How low can you go...

hhp

Windows rendering ignores the reality of fonts without special TrueType hinting.
Mac rendering accommodates all fonts.
Isn’t it better to be inclusive?

What has Chalkboard got to do with this thread?

TextEdit is more typographically caring than Word, IMO, but that too is irrelevant to this thread.

"But isn't Firefox displaying anti-aliased text, so it only displays "graymaps"? In that case, if you've embedded black and white bitmaps, they'd never be called."
-- I put the following in the fonts.conf file
<match target="font">
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
But it didn't help.

"BTW, how are you embedding the bitmaps?"
I used fontforge to generate the embedded bitmap ttf file and followed the instructon:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/editexample8.html

Also I find out that some system setting in fonts.conf can turn embedded bitmap off. So I especitally turned it on by setting the following in my local fonts.conf. But it seems still not working...

<match target="font" >
<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>

First I need to let the browser display the embedded bitmap font, kerning is the second priority here. But so far I'm not able to reach my first goal yet. BTW, I'm testing with Firefox 3.6 in RedHat 5.5.

But why are you embedding bitmaps? What are you trying to achieve?

> Isn’t it better to be inclusive?

There's a difference between inclusive and dumbest-common-denominator.
Gray, fuzzy text is crap, period.

And the production of Chalkboard is simply one more clue that points to
Apple's total abandonment of its commendable typographic sensitivity
of yesteryear. The tables have turned, and we need to snap out of denial.

hhp

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksherman/6639638197

hhp