[TxMt] Bolding and antialiasing (and possibly Markdown)

[Jeffrey E. Forcier]

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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