Hey all,
Thanks to Allan & co (is there really an '& co'?) for all the hard work--been using TM for about a year and still loving it :) I'm having an odd issue which I fear is actually a feature and not a bug (and I'm not even positive it's TM's fault), so to speak, but am asking anyway.
Most monospaced fonts such as Monaco, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Andale Mono, &c, show up as vaguely bold when antialiasing is turned on; however I only realized this recently when messing around with Markdown and its syntax highlighting.
When surrounding text with double asterisks, which as I'm sure everyone knows is Markdown for bold, the text actually gets *less bold* compared to the rest of the text! With antialiasing off, the amount of bolding is normal, e.g. stuff in double-asterisks is noticeably stronger than everything else.
When using Courier or Courier New, things also look more normal (with antialiasing on *or* off). However, I hate coding with serif fonts, so just switching to Courier isn't really an option. I've looked around a bit for other fonts but so far they all display the same behavior as the bunch mentioned earlier.
So. Is this something TextMate is doing, or is it at the system level? In the various terminal apps I've never had issues like this. And regardless, does anyone have any suggestions? I realize that at the end of the day it's a silly thing to complain about, but I tend to be a stickler about stuff like this; if, when writing in Markdown, my italics are italic, I'd like my bolds to be bold too =)
Thanks for your time, Jeff
-- Jeffrey E. Forcier Junior Developer, Research and Development Stroz Friedberg, LLC 15 Maiden Lane, 12th Floor New York, NY 10038 [main]212-981-6540 [direct]212-981-6546 http://www.strozllc.com
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Jeffrey E. Forcier wrote:
[…] So. Is this something TextMate is doing, or is it at the system level? In the various terminal apps I've never had issues like this. And regardless, does anyone have any suggestions? I realize that at the end of the day it's a silly thing to complain about, but I tend to be a stickler about stuff like this; if, when writing in Markdown, my italics are italic, I'd like my bolds to be bold too =)
It is a system thing: for some reason the system decides to not use the bold variant of the bitstream font, but to "bolden" up the regular font, making it look pretty ugly.
Some of us have toyed with it, we've never actually come up with a proper solution.
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This is completely bogus. And even more so if you're sending an email to a list. You really should remove this waste of bytes from your signature.
Jeroen.
On Dec 19, 2005, at 4:20 AM, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:
It is a system thing: for some reason the system decides to not use the bold variant of the bitstream font, but to "bolden" up the regular font, making it look pretty ugly.
Some of us have toyed with it, we've never actually come up with a proper solution.
Well, that's a bummer, isn't it. You haven't found any good fonts which mitigate the problem? Like I said, Courier does seem to get around it, the only problem being that it's serif.
This is completely bogus. And even more so if you're sending an email to a list. You really should remove this waste of bytes from your signature.
It's something the lawyers here at work make everyone stick in their signature, I'm afraid. Eventually I'm going to get around to switching all my mailing list memberships to a personal account, I know it's an annoying sig, and yes, it's not exactly logical when applied to a list address. My apologies =) If it makes you happy I'll try and remember to remove it to further replies to this list (I doubt they'll complain) ;)
Regards, Jeff
-- Jeffrey E. Forcier Junior Developer, Research and Development Stroz Friedberg, LLC 15 Maiden Lane, 12th Floor New York, NY 10038 [main]212-981-6540 [direct]212-981-6546 http://www.strozllc.com
On 19/12/2005, at 14:52, Jeffrey E. Forcier wrote:
Some of us have toyed with it, we've never actually come up with a proper solution.
Well, that's a bummer, isn't it. You haven't found any good fonts which mitigate the problem? Like I said, Courier does seem to get around it, the only problem being that it's serif.
I think Michael Sheets tested a number of Vera Sans Mono derivatives, but they all showed the problem.
The bug is pretty weird -- I can actually cd to ~/Library/Fonts and gzip my Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font, then gunzip it, go back to TM, and suddenly I have beautiful (correct) bolding (when text is redrawn), and it makes a huge visual difference!
For this reason alone, I'm likely going to switch to using the Cocoa font rendering stuff in some future (long term) version, since these do not show the problem (AFAIK). Unfortunately they can't really synthesize bold for fonts which lack it (like Monaco), which is also quite a loss, as that's the default font.
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Allan Odgaard -
Jeffrey E. Forcier -
Jeroen van der Ham