PUBLIC MARKS with tags typography & mac

As we dig into type rendering on the web, we’ll begin by looking at text rendering engines. We are all familiar with operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X, but within each OS are smaller, specialized components available for use by applications like web browsers. APIs such as Core Text on Mac OS X, and DirectWrite and GDI on Windows, are examples of these components and are responsible for rasterizing fonts’ vector outlines. Let’s examine screenshots of web type as rendered by each of these APIs, and talk about the application independence of rendering engines.

Quick­Look, the abil­ity to see a quick pre­view of files and fold­ers sim­ply by select­ing and then press­ing the Space bar has been avail­able for some time now. This is a great time saver and gives access to infor­ma­tion that in many cases you would oth­er­wise have to install spe­cific soft­ware to get. Quick­Look can view was num­ber of for­mats but it is pos­si­ble to extent its use by adding plug-ins to it. Most of them are free. Some soft­ware devel­op­ers offer plug-ins for Quick­Look for their soft­ware if Quick­Look does not pre­view files made by their software. One of Quick­Look great­est fea­tures in my opin­ion is that it can pre­view fonts. Not only to see if it’s the font I am look­ing for, but also to see if the six glyphs spe­cific for the Ice­landic lan­guage, are in the font (which is a com­mon prob­lem) or, if they are, to see if they are drawn in a proper way and usable.

Loremify is a one-click tool to copy Lorem Ipsum. It lets you wrap in html, specify the amount of text, and copy it to your clipboard—all in one click. It runs as a Dashboard Widget in Mac OS X, and is a mere 270kb download.

nice apps for mac !

Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes. Help with localisation / translation.

Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac supports the embedding of “sfnt fonts” (TrueType, OpenType PS, OpenType TT) using the font-face declaration. Technically the fonts are not embedded in the website, but they are simply linked like an image file. Thus the fonts need to be stored on a public server. Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. FDI fonts.info believes in the future of web fonts, so we decided to provide webdesigners with a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings. Graublau Sans Web regular and bold can be downloaded for free from fonts.info and you may embed them in any website you like. If you do, please put a link to fonts.info on your site and mind the End User License Agreement.

Apple announced a October 26 release date for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) today, along with more detailed information on the new system, including over “300 New Features”. Let’s look a little closer at the features in the Fonts category and give them snarky grades based on their potential value.

From TypeCon2007, a press release congratulates Apple and Microsoft for extending an agreement on cross-licensing fonts.

Many people spend hours a day looking at text on their desktop, laptop, and handheld computer screens, fueling a demand for the highest possible quality text rendering. There are three primary axes to evaluate text rendering quality: contrast of the glyph renderings, fidelity to the original forms, and evenness of spacing. Until now, font rendering implementors have had to make a difficult tradeoff between these goals. It's straightforward to render glyph shapes and spacing accurately if you can tolerate a loss of contrast, as exhibited by the font rendering in Mac OS X. Similarly, applying font hinting techniques originally developed for bilevel rendering can improve contrast significantly, but at the cost of significant distortion of letterforms. This white paper introduces FontFocus, a new patent-pending technology from Artifex Software, Inc., the people behind the Ghostscript PDL engine. FontFocus, for the first time, renders text both with uncompromising fidelity, and with contrast improvements as good as the best of the font hinting techniques.

Most frequent fonts in the Mac.

Now I know why my iBook's keyboard has this funny symbol.