Font rendering! Choose your favorite!

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

So, I’ve been obsessing over my font configuration here on Ubuntu Linux, and I can’t quite make up my mind. So, I’ve put together a website on my PHP teacher’s web server, that lets people vote for their favorite font rendering settings! It takes two random samples, and lets you vote for one… Then it compares the one you voted for, with another random one, and lets you vote. It does this until you’ve seen and voted for (or against) all 11, and then it shows you the statistics.

Font Rendering Voting Page

Edit 1: Ok, I see people have voted, and viewed this thread… But not many people talking. So, post what you voted for! If you forgot, just head onto the page again, it remembers ya.

Adding a poll.

Edit 2: Blegh. Originally I had the image ID next to each one, but in the preview it showed the option number next to that… So seeing “10. 10 - Slight Hinting, Grayscale AA” looked redundant, so I took it out.

And now I can’t edit it back.

The ID’s go in order.

Edit 3: DO NOT USE OPERA. It apparently will infinitely loop on you, and right now I don’t know how to avoid this. I guess Opera doesn’t correctly support the way this version of PHP/Apache sets cookies.

#2

Sorry, but this test is way too long.
(Unless it’s not working properly for me)

#3

Reminds me of an eye exam… which is better? 1 or 2? … uhm, they’re the same… Not to be mean, but isn’t there something better to do? In a re-install or two you won’t even care enough to go to the trouble of setting the fonts to that level ever again anyways… (or maybe that’s just me with age).

#4

Same with me, So I guess its not due to age. :smiley: Long-long ago in age of tyrant rulers and samurais, I was crazy about downloading and installing all cool themes to my XP but they seemed to corrupt it very frequently so within few reinstalls i grew so sick that even in 21st century the only thing I do now in name of decoration is change my wallpaper once in a couple of months. :wink:

#5

I’m not sure why it’s long for you. Make sure cookies are enabled.

There are 11 total sample images, 2 on each page. Granted, it only shows one new one per page (after the first page), so 11 - 2, that’s 9 votes max.

Just click the mouse 9 times after comparing.

Well, they are the same font, but they’re rendered differently. The differences are most noticeable in the first couple lines, but I included the larger font sizes for comparison’s sake.

Yeah, when I first used Linux I went theme-crazy and started changing EVERY possible setting I could find x) Nowadays I stay at the defaults for the most part, though. I change the wallpaper, and if the default theme doesn’t look nice I’ll change it once or twice.

This, however, is kinda about usability/readability, particularly at smaller font levels. A good comparison outside of this, is how Mac OS X renders fonts blurry, retaining the shape of the font better at the expense of ‘crispness’. Windows, on the other hand, will slightly modify the font to fit into the ‘pixel grid’ (called “hinting”), making it render much sharper and arguably more readable.

The number of votes went from around 10 - 20, to over 200. Either someone didn’t have cookies enabled, or TONS of people have voted.

#6

Unless he has posted this thread on some other very frequently visited forum such as ‘ubuntu forum’ I dont think no. Of votes can reach 200+ in case of one person voting once. Thats coz this thread has only 68 views (now when im writing this) and I havent voted yet. :stuck_out_tongue:

This might be paranormal effects of supernatural cookies mixed with a spell of super long tests . :smiley: (im not really sure though coz I never made a poll)

#7

Well, the way the site works is it stores a session cookie on the person’s browser, and on the server side, within the session, keeps track of which images have been voted for/against. There’s a SLIGHT chance that they’ll see the same two on the first page, but past that they’ll never see the same one twice (except the one they voted for). After the first page, if you vote for the second image it votes down the first, and votes up the second. If you vote for the first image, it just keeps the vote that’s already there, and labels the second image as ‘seen’. This way, one person voting multiple times only counts as one vote.

If the person has cookies disabled, they don’t get the session cookie. So they just keep voting for two random images, it never stores which ones they’ve looked at, and it never stores which one they voted for… So it keeps adding more and more votes. It never down-votes any of them.

#8

@Tynach: The first time I polled, i worked, and I voted for image 3.
This time its not working, and it just keeps popping out random images and just never ends.

P.S. I’m equally crazy about fonts on my computer, I should dabble in some serious typography now.

EDIT: It works in a different browser, so most likely the problem is related to cookies. Voted for ID 9 this time, but 3 and 9 are pretty close.

#9

What browser did it not work in? When I was taking the PHP class, one of my classmates had an issue with one of the Internet Explorer versions, with regenerated session IDs. When I tried the same IE version with my site (not this font site, I should add), it worked fine… And I copy/pasted that code into this site so it’d (hopefully) work correctly.

#10

Not an edit because it’s a different topic from my above post, but I should try putting different ‘uses’ into the sample images. Sometimes what works great for Arial at different point sizes, doesn’t work so well for whatever UI font is used by default (in my case, the Ubuntu font on… Ubuntu). And vice-versa.

But that would possibly invalidate the current results… I really should make this system a bit more generic. Should re-write it.

#11

I was using Opera.

#12

I have had some WEIRD issues with Opera. With mine, I had a very simple nested list that rendered correctly in Chrome, Firefox, IE 8, and even IE 6. Even IE 6 running in WINE. Opera did NOT render it correctly, having no bullet next to some items and two bullets next to others. This was basic HTML and CSS, with nothing fancy about it.

I hear a lot of good things about Opera, and I’ve experienced a lot of good things about it. But the bad things I’ve experienced from it were… Bad.

/rant

Odd it’d fail in Opera, cookies are pretty standard now. I do know that my teacher’s server (lampbusters, which this is hosted on) automatically deletes the cookies faster than I’d like… I set the expiration to 2 weeks, but they don’t last beyond a day. I wonder if that’s randomly messing up cookies in random browsers (one guy’s IE, another guy’s Opera). It is running CentOS 4, he says he’s going to completely re-do the entire server at some point.

Edit: Anyway… Here are 3 and 9 side-by-side:

http://lampbusters.com/~tynach/font/images/auto_med_rgb.pnghttp://lampbusters.com/~tynach/font/images/nohint_rgb.png

#13

voted… a couple of minutes in chrome but it went over and over with opera haha… anyway, i can stop using blender anyday but not opera!

#14

Yes, I kept refreshing, and watched it raise the number of votes higher and higher. It stopped at 295 on my end, at which point I tried to find out if there was anything in other browsers to trigger the same behavior. Haven’t found anything yet.

I guess I’ll modify the first post, and ask people not to use Opera.