In article <noemailhere-477ACE.17244107052008@news.mts.net>, The NewGuy <noemailhere@please.comm> wrote:
> > > if you use Opera there is no text spilling anywhere. > > > > At the cost of text getting out of focus. > > How in the world does text get "out of focus"? In Opera my text is > always razor sharp at 1680x1050. Please explain. >
If you zoom a picture up from its native px size, it will soon be noticeably fuzzier. We were at some point in the thread talking pictures of text not html text. So what I am saying certainly applies to this. If you are not following this part, let me know and I will explain more.
OK, now lets look at proper html text, (not specified in pixel font-sizes - to avoid a side issue to do with Windows Internet Explorer). Not gifs, not jpgs or pngs but simply text typed into html elements.
Most good browsers allow one to make the text bigger or smaller to suit oneself. Either on a tactical basis, page to page and using menu and/or keyboard commands or on a more global basis via preference settings or user stylesheets. These latter allow a user to avoid suffering impossibly small fonts as well as slightly uncomfortable ones. The browser simply overrides any font style settings of the author of the site and substitutes the user's preferred. A pretty wholesome thing, I hope you will agree.
Take a look at http://store.apple.com/us (to take a Mac example) in Safari 2 or any browser that does not zoom the page but just zooms the text. The text stays crisp no matter how big it gets. Never mind that some of the text disappears or the design breaks (*that* is another matter entirely). It stays crips because the browser draws up real text from your fonts on your machine and uses the vector type maths to do so. That is the magic of real fonts, they can be scaled and remain crispier than chips.
Now look at it in Opera and zoom it up and it gets blurry. There is nothing to explain, it gets blurry and it does so in pretty well the same way as pics do when blown up beyond their native pxs. There is no special font maths involved here. The font is treated as just a set of pxs and is enlarged by a crude(r) browser algorithm to be bigger. The blur is then the general blur that results from machines not knowing what is important and what not when blowing up pics. Even a classy image program like Photoshop does poorly when blowing up a pic, browsers are not any better.
