[webkit-dev] Feature announcement: Font Boosting

[John Mellor]

Hi webkit-dev,

You may have heard <http://youtu.be/aCdZIHBbRV0?t=1m26s> that Chrome for
Android includes a "Font Boosting" feature. This is similar in intent to
the text size adjust<http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/DOCUMENTATION/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/AdjustingtheTextSize/AdjustingtheTextSize.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006510-SW16>feature
in Mobile Safari, that the QT port also seems
interested in <http://webkit.org/b/73546>. Other mobile browsers have
corresponding features: Mobile Firefox uses font
inflation<http://dbaron.org/log/20111126-font-inflation>and IE Mobile
applies text
size adjustment<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff462082(v=vs.92).aspx#sectionToggle2>
.

Font Boosting increases the font size in wide blocks, so that you can
easily read the text after double-tapping to fit the block to the screen,
instead of having to zoom in further then scroll from side to side for each
line you read.

The details are subtle (since web text layout is complicated), and there's
still a lot of tweaking to do. We chose to boost font sizes more than
Mobile Safari (which has various limits), producing easily legible text,
more in line with IE Mobile and Firefox Mobile.

This is core functionality for mobile browsers, so we would like to
upstream our implementation of Font Boosting to WebCore. We are keen to
share code with other ports (e.g. QT and Mobile Safari) that are interested
in this feature, and will be happy to incorporate suggestions on how to
make this easier.

I've opened webkit.org/b/84186 to track this effort.

Best wishes,
John
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