Bug 4842 – Small caps should use uniform antialiasing settings

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: CONFIGURATION CHANGED
• Component: Layout and Rendering

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Text rendered with font-variant:small-caps CSS style uses uppercase letters rendered at 70% instead of 
lowercase ones. Sometimes, this results in uppercase and small caps having different antialiasing 
settings (because of the system default 8 pt threshold). 

Steps to reproduce:
1. Set "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes 8 and smaller" in Appearance control panel
2. Open the attached test case.

Results: the upper string is not antialiased, the middle one is partially antialiased, and the bottom one 
is antialiased
Expected results: the middle line should be all antialiased, too (or, arguably, all not anti-aliased)

Obviously, it doesn't look nice when some letters of a word are anti-aliased, and others aren't.

See also: bug 4355

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 3753 [details]
test case

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

FWIW, the menu at the top of the NucleusCMS.org web site uses small caps and thus exhibits this issue.

http://nucleuscms.org/

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 102425 [details]
Screenshot from Safari 5.0.5 on Mac OS X 10.6.8

[Tim Horton]

Created attachment 102426 [details]
[wrong settings] Screenshot from Safari 5.1 on 10.7.0

Looks totally different on 5.1/Lion.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Created an attachment (id=102426) [details]
> Screenshot from Safari 5.1 on 10.7.0
> 
> Looks totally different on 5.1/Lion.

Is this with “turn off text smoothing” set to “8 and smaller” in System Preferences > General?

[Tim Horton]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > Created an attachment (id=102426) [details] [details]
> > Screenshot from Safari 5.1 on 10.7.0
> > 
> > Looks totally different on 5.1/Lion.
> 
> Is this with “turn off text smoothing” set to “8 and smaller” in System Preferences > General?

This is why I shouldn't do work at night :-) I missed those instructions because I was stuck thinking about the other bug.

In any case, I don't think they're the same bug (I got here from Alexey's comment on https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36182) because of those restrictions. In 36182, the AA is being disabled way earlier than the system cutoff (and that's what the bug is about), while in this bug, it's respecting the system cutoff (as we can see by my stupid mistake above) in an unfortunate way. But I could be wrong.

[Ahmad Saleem]

@ap - It seems to work fine on WebKit ToT (261814@main) and don’t have difference in antialising shown as in reference issue. Can we close this or it might be specific now to non-retina macs or some older supported setting or system configuration?

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

I don't know if this text smoothing setting still exists. Could indeed be only showing up for non-Retina displays (or even only for CRT displays?!)

[Karl Dubost]

% defaults -currentHost read -g AppleFontSmoothing 
2024-07-25 13:32:52.542 defaults[66134:8777318] 
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleFontSmoothing) does not exist

font smoothing is not anymore available in preferences.

And the testcase on a non-retina screen is displaying correctly.