Here are some font-related issues I ran across porting the explorer-nav.lzx to DHTML:
1) Since DHTML doesn't support compiled fonts, we have to rely on system fonts unless we use a system like SIFR - see http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/ . This means fonts will not look exactly the same across runtimes unless we use only system fonts, and even then letter spacing and rendering/smoothing is often different. For now, I added a feature to the SWF kernel to support the lookup of comma-separated fonts so DHTML can fall back to a system font when a compiled font isn't found by name. For example, font="itemfont,helvetica,sans-serif" now finds the compiled font 'itemfont' in SWF and falls back to 'helvetica,sans-serif' in DHTML. Note that 'itemfont' is really 'helmet-bold', a helvetica bold variant, so the weight and font are not the same. Also note that the compiled font declaration doesn't identify the style is bold, so matching the weight (bold) will require changes here. 2) DHTML font size measurement doesn't currently account for leading and SWF does. For example, 13pt type is 20 px high in swf, and 13px high in DHTML. This was easy to fix in explorer-nav - I just changed the label positioning to use valign="middle" instead of hard-coded y values. I need to file a bug for this issue - I'll do this later on, after I've slept a bit. 3) Small type isn't smoothed in DHTML like it is in SWF. I'm not sure what to do here, except choose our fonts carefully and/or avoid small point sizes. The bottom line is, I don't think we can expect pixel-perfect font rendering across all runtimes. However, with minimal changes for alignment and font names, I was able to make explorer-nav look pretty good across SWF and DHTML, at least to my eye. Regards, Max Carlson OpenLaszlo.org _______________________________________________ Laszlo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-dev
