View Topography Tag

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’m a sucker for topography, something I really enjoyed in college when using LaTeX to get really cool looking printouts. A lot of that fun was lost with I started using applications like Word that do a pretty good job of kerning and hyphenating text without you having to do anything. Using (X)HTML I often just let the browser do what it does, even if it leaves a lot to be desired. This changed today when reading A List Apart’s wonderful article The Look That Says Book.

I’ve run into a bit of an issue. XML uses UTF-8 encoding. I wouldn’t think it would be a big issue, but my web pages render in ISO-8859-1. Since my ISP uses perl 5.6.1, I can’t easily encode/decode between the two Unicode formats. So, I thought I’d just render my pages in UTF-8. Ouch, bigger headache. Now older articles don’t look right and some of the WebAPP code converts things wrong. I’m still looking for a solution. For now, you may find some things display wrong here.