Bob wrote: I must be missing something in reading:
================================================================ *I have now done quite a bit of experimentation with html5/canvas pages of my own (documentation available on request, but a test page is viewable at http://motif.gla.ac.uk/JSmolTest/canvasTextCheck.html <http://motif.gla.ac.uk/JSmolTest/canvasTextCheck.html>;* *). If things are as straightforward as indicated then the following should satisfy everyone: * ctx.font = "12px Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif"; and ctx.font = "bold 12px Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif"; Windows browsers ignore Helvetica Neue (the current Mac OS default) and pick up Arial, the Windows default. If there is some way of testing this on a JSmol canvas I should be interested in trying it or seeing the result. Wasn't that a request for Helvetica Neue? ================================================================ Sorry Bob, we seem to have got our wires crossed. I should have known better than to try to use gmail for mailing lists. It really is a nightmare. Only reason for doing so was another list seemed to have blacklisted my ISP. Anyway... ...things were not that straightforward, and as I discovered after that initial post. To summarize: 1. Helvetica Neue is the default Mac font on the current OSX Yosemite (and also on Mavericks) and iOS 8. If you specify sans-serif you get Helvetica Neue. 2. The default font previously was Lucida Grande, although HN was installed. 3. Apple in iOS 7 went to extreme lengths to support sophisticated resizable versions of Helvetica Neue, and also allow single-pixel thin sizes on iOS retina display. 4. Fonts on screen undergo sub-pixel rendering (anti-aliasing) to smooth them. Apple has always paid more attention to this than Windows. (When Microsoft started introducing it, many users objected as they preferred the darker jagged text they were used to, in preference to the lighter effect of anti-aliasing). 5. Apple has clearly changed its rendering engine between Snow Leopard and Mavericks in a way that affects the canvas in JSmol, but does not affect general MacOS X rendering or rendering of text on a canvas. I have documented some of this at http://motif.gla.ac.uk/JSmolTest/HN/HN.html I personally am interested in why this is happening - is it something to do with having a 3d rather than a 2d canvas for example? - but I'm not that interested. As far as you are concerned I would forget it - there are more important technical problems that deserve your attention than this. You say: =================================================================== Something is too subtle there for me -- they all look fine. Except in the cases where you see text running over the text box, that's a bug in Safari misreporting =================================================================== It may be too subtle for you, but it is there. I have an eye for these things and can see the difference between Helvetica Neue and Avenir immediately. I have blown them up, measured them, analysed the colours and could explain it to you, but you'd be as well to take my word for it. It's not a big difference, but I'll serve it on my site and it will give any Mac user a slightly better experience, whether or not they could analyse it. It's all about subconscious perception. The bottom line is that Java Applets are clearly doomed and unlikely to see 2016 (I'm sad about that as some of my own die with them), but Jmol lives on as JSmol and my own Motivated Proteins site lives on with it. Thank you again for that. JSmol may be slower than Jmol (and Firefox/Mac does not seem too happy with it sometimes) but JavaScript and computers will get faster, and browsers will be continue to improve their optimization for JavaScript, so time will cure the current problems. David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet _______________________________________________ Jmol-users mailing list Jmol-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-users
