Fonts again

[Aussie John]

For Mac

You can adjust the font size at which text smoothing will not operate and how heavy the effect is.

(system prefs/appearance)

Remember to restart filemaker to see the effects.

I have it set to turn off below 9 point and that seems good

[CyborgSam]

I learned something today... The font smoothing in FM7 on a Mac running OS X Panther does respond to the smoothing settings in the Appearance control panel.

Aussie John & Hurican->

Please take screenshots of your FM smoothing and not smoothing & post them here, I'd like to compare them in Photoshop.

As I said, my tests showed that Windows settings had no affect (XP & FM7).

[shadowdoc]

I agree with CyborgSam...the clear type tuner definitely improved my non-FM text, but I see no improvemnt in FM7. I wonder how many other bugs are in FM7 that were known about at the time of release...

[Fenton]

The Font Smoothing option in Appearances does matter, at least in OS 10.3.3. Lower it below 10 and size 10 is smoothed, raise it and it is not. You have to switch modes or otherwise refresh the screen. Looks not so great either way, but not bad either (this is on a Mac). I preferred it not smoothed. But smoothing is the future (if not present) of computing, so we'll have to live with it in some way.

[Aussie John]

CyborgSam said:

I learned something today... The font smoothing in FM7 on a Mac running OS X Panther does respond to the smoothing settings in the Appearance control panel.

Aussie John & Hurican->

Please take screenshots of your FM smoothing and not smoothing & post them here, I'd like to compare them in Photoshop.

As I said, my tests showed that Windows settings had no affect (XP & FM7).

Sam- you need to restart filemaker to have effect

attached file with smoothing on to all font sizes-see next post also

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

all smooth.pdf

[Aussie John]

without smoothing attached- Best seems to be somewhere in between at stopping effect at 9 points and below

The smoothing is on the medium setting

12 point and above.pdf

[CyborgSam]

Fonts are designed for different purposes. A font designed specifically for the screen should look good without smoothing, in fact smoothing can make it look worse. A font designed for print will generally look better with smoothing, but it's not a given.

In the good old days, font designers took the time to make bitmap versions of their fonts so they'd appear optimally on the screen. Nowadays the font rendering engine does bitmapping for all pixel sizes (regardless of smoothing). Progress? Not in my mind. My 53yo eyes can still read Geneva 9 or 10 on the Mac, but I have trouble reading the newer fonts with no bitmaps. Apple's solution was to create Lucida Grande, which was specifically designed to smooth well using Apple's Mac OS X rendering engine.

Fenton's right, we'll have to live with it. As display resolution increases (dot-per-inch), the smoothing becomes less of an issue.

Give me bitmaps or give me death? Tough choice

[johnrh]

As the person who started this topic off, I for one do not accept that we simply have to live with it.

It is clearly a major issue to large many people and as such it is essential that Filemaker address the issue.

Ver 6 was fine - call me naive but can it be so difficult to put the smoothing engine back to what it was in earlier verions?

This is not just a "nice to have" but a real essential for a large number of people.

It renders solutions unviewable and very unprofessional and it is down to Filemaker to address it. The last hing I intend to do having just forked out

[Fenton]

As the person who said "we'll have to live with it," I apologize if you thought I meant you'd have to live with unacceptable fuzziness. What I meant was that font smoothing is not going away, so we'll have to deal with it, by increasing font size in some cases where it was just too small. I don't think it is a solution to have to tell all your clients that they must turn off font smoothing on the their system, even if that was an option.

I was mostly responding to the statement (later recanted) that on Macs FileMaker was using its own proprietary smoothing independent of the operating system, which it isn't.

I support those of you on PC's kicking up a huge fuss, if FileMaker is using its own smoothing independent of the operating system and if this is causing problems (which it obviously is). On Macs we are not seeing this, though just having smoothing enabled is causing a little fuzziness; but it's acceptable (barely), in any case the same as other apps.

Many of my clients are on PCs. I've already had one upset client who can no longer read his text. He uses 7 because of its Japanese language support (which he's real happy about). In his case, it was he who designed the layouts and insisted I use a small font size (which I could barely read on my Mac), and it is he who will redo the layouts (it was mostly a simple solution). But I can imagine a nightmare if I delivered a solution and had to resize all the font boxes (you can resize them all at once on a layout, but this may cause some havoc).

[shadowdoc]

We shouldn't have to resize anything to suit a software flaw that should have been dealt with BEFORE the app was released. This is not a neat feature of the program we're talking about, it's a basic requirement of the program that it be capable of rendering fonts correctly on both platforms with "usual" settings. It's FM's job to make sure the program can get along in the computer world...not ours.

Besides, I tried 14 and 18 pt text and the problem still exists...I can't go any larger than that.

Version: v7.x

Platform: Windows XP