Designing with Silverlight

Re: Decent font rendering and font embedding. When?

philjones — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:52:18 GMT

y_makram:
WPF has outstanding typography features

Perhaps, but irrespective of "features" the final rendered effect on screen is aweful. In WPF and Silverlight. The result looks equally bad from now having worked with both.

The clarity that the ClearType engine may be providing in certain narrow conditions (average to small fonts) is not translating to larger headline sized fonts at all. Far from rich, poweful, confident typography the result comes off as scratchy and scrawny. Like a malnutritioned chicken.

I appreciate this may not be a quick/easy fix if MS has bet the farm on the ClearType renderer...but it would be immensely helpful to know if there is:

1. An appreciation of the problem, and an intent to fix it,

2. If that's likely to happen anytime soon.

Like the other posters on this thread....I agree, typography is a very important, very serious issue. Animation and shapes are quite secondary to the clear, beautiful display of type. There is more type and text in the web than pictures. It's like oxygen.

Cheers.

Re: Decent font rendering and font embedding. When?

bruce.denham — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:34:03 GMT

I, too, am less than impressed with Microsoft's commitment to good typography. Currently, Flash beats the snot out of what is available in SL2 beta 2. The text in Flash is much more polished, with far greater control, including the support of OTFs.

I'm committed to Silverlight because of many other features. But the typography is slow in coming. Hopefully we see some work in this area soon.

Bruce

Re: Decent font rendering and font embedding. When?

aoe_dev — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:56:24 GMT

Ok, but when will I see subpixel antialiasing giving fonts aesthetic and not pixel value? My big problem with MS is the fact that they've thrown hundreds of years of typographic development down the drain in favor of aligning the shapes of type to pixels. Type development has been at a standstill on the windows platform for years so I seriously hope that this will evelove fast, otherwise Silverlight will have a set of very nice functions for animation and video under the hood but nothing to show for in terms of presenting text properly.

Can you give me a direction of these features that will "even beat Flash" in the future?

Don't take this as an assault, I'm merely responing to a serious issue.

Re: Decent font rendering and font embedding. When?

y_makram — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:56:10 GMT

WPF has outstanding typography features, so Microsoft is taking typography seriously, but Silverlight is still an evolving technology and have a subset of WPF features, expect great typography features in the future that will even beat Flash's features

Decent font rendering and font embedding. When?

aoe_dev — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:50:17 GMT

When will Silverlight get support for these features that I take for granted using Flash?

Silverlight has an amazing potential, but when will Microsoft start taking typography seriously?