[webkit-dev] Feature announcement: Font Boosting

[John Mellor]

> I think it would be great to talk about this at the WebKit summit
tomorrow, if you are there.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make the WebKit summit, but beverloo
mentioned that you were able to chat a little. I'm happy to discuss further
by email or otherwise :)

For those who aren't following the bug, I've uploaded the full diff[1] of
Chrome for Android's current Font Boosting implementation (not for review,
just for reference to show how it fits together). And I've uploaded the
first actual patch (adding compile/runtime flags) to webkit.org/b/87394,
which is now up for review.

Cheers,
John

[1]: http://webkit.org/b/FontBoosting

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 2:02 AM, Kenneth Rohde Christiansen <
kenneth.christiansen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it would be great to talk about this at the WebKit summit
> tomorrow, if you are there.
>
> Cheers
> Kenneth
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:17 PM, John Mellor <johnme at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
> Senior Engineer
> Nokia Mobile Phones, Browser / WebKit team
> Phone  +45 4093 0598 / E-mail kenneth at webkit. <http://gmail.com>org
>
> http://codeposts.blogspot.com ﹆﹆﹆
>
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