Font in Xara <> Browser

[sparcx]

Hi,

i am trying to make a webdesign completely in Xara.

http://666kb.com/i/ba5k5raff2y0gt3ic.png

The (small) Font never looks the same in the Browser.
In Xara it looks much more softened. Is there a possibility to change that in Xara?

[Egg Bramhill]

What font are you using sparcx?

[sparcx]

ok. i forgot to say:

i am more a beginner to Xara than to Webdesign.
In Both, Xara an the Website displayed in Firefox Verdana 13px, Line Height 16 px is used.

But it is the same with all other websafe fonts e.g. arial.

Font seems to be displayed in an other way in xara. bolder.

so i wonder if there is any way, to change to a more browser like look.

What font are you using sparcx?

[steve.ledger]

In Xara it looks much more softened. Is there a possibility to change that in Xara?

All browsers use their own font rendering. Tried Safari? Although version 4 has changed a little for the better (for Windows users) the Safari browser renders fonts much softer than other browsers.

So long as you stick to web safe fonts and whole pixel sizes, your text will display pretty much the same in all browsers albeit for individual browser rendering differences.

As far as making Xara text look like browsers, only the 'preview' will do this (using IE engine). Otherwise you are looking at a vector application, not a browser - all graphics apps show fonts differently
.

[covoxer]

The reason is that Xtreme uses it's own font rendering engine. We do our best to make the overal size of the text similar to the browser but the precise outlook may differ.
As Steve points out, different browsers can also use different rendering engines resulting in slight outlook differences.
As long we talk about officially supported browsers, on Windows platform - IE, FF and Opera use Windows text rendering engine, Safari uses it's own, same as on MacOs. In Safari you can control the level of the font antialiasing thus making text look differently. In Windows you can turn antialiasing off resulting in IE, FF and Opera rendering pixelated fonts.
On other platforms (MacOs, Linux, mobile devices) different text rendering engines are used.
As the result, we can not make it look exactly the same as in all browsers.

[steve.ledger]

In my experience, FF has always been quite different by default to IE/Opera and now Chrome and Safari.
.

[covoxer]

Steve, in your example, what font size do you use?
FF has different font size rounding rules thn IE, but if it actually renders text using the same font size as IE, it looks identical.
The font size is always rounded to the whole pixels. In your example I see that FF is using larger font size, thus I suppose you have set not the whole pixel size font in your design.

[edit] I think it's a fragment from the demo template?


It's easy to see which browser uses Windows engine - disable antialiasing in Windoes and you'll see.
Besides the mentioned font size rounding issue, there are many other differences in how browsers interpret text properties in HTML. So that even browsers that use the same text engine may produce different results, even though the same characters looks identically. But that's another long story.

[covoxer]

Ok, it is a demo page. But, here's how it looks in my FF (3.0.11).
As you see it's the same as IE. The font sizes used are 12px and 14px which are not rounded and thus are supposed to look the same in all Windows text engine based browsers.
Perhaps you have some settings changed in your FF Steve?

[covoxer]

One more thing. Safari 4 has an option to use Windows text rendering engine instead of Apple's, and it seems to be enabled by default.

[BobInce]

The (small) Font never looks the same in the Browser.

Welcome to the web. Fonts never render the same across different browsers/platforms/settings. Even changing the anti-aliasing settings on your Windows install can change the metrics of the font.

In Xara it looks much more softened. Is there a possibility to change that in Xara?

What for?

And no, Xtreme can't really use Windows font rendering (ClearType, in this case), because there are a thousand effects you can apply to text in Xtreme that Windows will never natively support. Xtreme's rendering is an accurate representation of the vectors of the font, not fudged to screen-pixels because Xtreme is a WYSIWYG vector graphics package which is not based around pixels.