[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 14921] Normal (non-bold) text in Safari on Windows looks bolder than the same text in Firefox or IE

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14921


aroben at apple.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX
            Summary|No normal value for font-   |Normal (non-bold) text in
                   |weight available in CSS.    |Safari on Windows looks
                   |                            |bolder than the same text in
                   |                            |Firefox or IE




------- Comment #12 from aroben at apple.com  2007-08-10 21:40 PDT -------
Hi John,

(In reply to comment #9)
> Then please clarify the rendering difference between Gecko and Webkit?
>
> If you can not agree that the text is bold please answer if you think the text
> looks exactly the same or not between the two browsers. If the text does not
> look the same then please explain how the text is being rendered differently
> since you insist it is not an issue of font-weight. 

As you can see in the comments in bug 14196 (which you already mentioned),
WebKit on both Mac OS X and Windows uses the CoreGraphics library to draw the
text in web pages. Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows use the Windows GDI
library to draw their text. These two libraries have different font
smoothing/kerning and glyph shaping algorithms, so the differences you're
seeing between Safari's text and Firefox's on Windows are expected. In fact, if
you open your test case in Firefox on OS X, you'll find that the text looks
pretty much identical to Safari's on both Mac OS X and Windows, since Firefox
on OS X uses CoreGraphics as well.

Mark was pointing out that text with font-weight:bold does indeed appear bolder
in Safari than text with font-weight:normal.

> Secondly how would you through CSS make the rendering of the text between Gecko
> and Webkit consistent? It needs to look exactly the same using the same CSS
> across browsers.

There is no CSS standard I know of that mandates that text look identical in
all browsers. All the CSS 2.1 spec says is "The values '100' to '900' form an
ordered sequence, where each number indicates a weight that is at least as dark
as its predecessor," and Safari is meeting this specification. So to answer
your question, we don't provide a way through CSS (or through any other method)
to make text in WebKit look identical to text in Gecko.

By the way, thanks for filing this bug even though you hit bug 14922 in the
middle of writing it up -- that looks like a nasty problem.


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