06.25.03

Safari font rendering jacked in final release

Posted in Apple at 7:51 pm by Craig

I’ve updated to the final release of Safari, and it turns out that Apple has decided to change the way it renders fonts now. I used to have the default browser font set to 11-point (comes with 13 as factory default), because I like to get more text on my screen, and with my flat panel, font smoothing, and good eyesight, 11pt is extremely readable. With the setting at 11pt, even sub-normal sized text on webpages was completely readable, and looked good. Now though, with the final release, any default font setting sized lower than 13pt causes sub-normal sized fonts (eg [font size=1]) to be rendered too small, so that font smoothing is turned off for them (I guess that probably means 8pt or below, which is what I’ve got configured in the General control panel), and they become unreadable. If I set the font size to 13pt, then sub-sized text is readable again, but normal-sized text is now huge, leading to insanely more scrolling. Surely this is not the sort of thing one should be changing between a final beta and a full release? Also, since this whole Safari thing is built on Konq, how about exposing the Konq “Don’t draw any fonts smaller than x points” option? Doesn’t even seem to be there hidden in the properties file. sigh. I used to like Safari, now I’m going to have to go look at Mozilla options again. UPDATE: It looks like this says there *is* some hidden way of turning back on the minimum-render size. But carefully omits instructions on how actually to do it, or what the preference is! Re-UPDATE: Ok, I found it by hunting a lot. Looks like the name of the pref is WebKitMinimumFontSize in com.apple.Safari, so

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitMinimumFontSize 9

does the trick.

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