Topography Troubles

I recently upgraded to Chrome 8 and ran into a minor problem. The text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; CSS option now causes hyphenate.js to display the hyphens in some words all the time. This, obviously, isn’t the desired effect I was going for. Because of this I turned off the optimizeLegibility option. I haven’t found any bugs or mention of this on the various sites yet. I did some more testing and found that there is subtle kerning going on, but little in the form of ligatures and other font improvements. So, for now, I’ll leave this option in my tool box to come back to at a later date.

I also ran into some issues on my XP systems where the fonts don’t render correctly, even though they should be present. I will have to do some validation on other systems before tweaking which fonts the site uses. I’ve been doing some research on font stacks and found a great article at “A Way Back” called Revised Font Stack. It has a recommend stack for “Trebuchet” that should look better on my Windows XP machine. I’ll give it a try and see how it does.

I’m still learning about topography and I’m researching different ideas. To that end, I’ve been reading Nice Web Type and other sites to learn additional techniques for better web topography. As I work to revamp my old ZX81 website, I hope to put some of these new ideas to the test.