Mac rendering on Windows

Si_Daniels's picture

Just installed the Safari Beta on an WinXP machine, not sure if the rendering is exactly the same as Mac OS, but it looks close. I wonder how people will react, at first glance the ice cubes may be a bit furry.

guifa's picture

I haven't seen it brought up at all here (as in typophile), although it was recently mentioned to me by a coworker.

Leopard will be including a new text-engine, although I'm not sure if it's a rendering engine, or a overhaul of old code and possibly supporting more OT features. ATSUI will be replaced by CoreText. I didn't go to WWDC, and so I'm not sure what exactly was discussed. There is a mailing list, I might join it if it's open. In any case, since ATSUI functioned on both OS 8.5 and OS X, but with greatly different rasterisation techniques, it might be limited to offering better frameworks for normal application developers to access type features and perhaps also expand OpenType support on the Mac.

Of course we'll have to wait until it's released to know since anyone who has a copy of Leopard is under NDA :(


SuperUltraFabulous's picture

Hi there:

Matthew thanks for posting the scoop on the upcoming architectural changes to Leopard. As it stands right now there is some OpenType support but it is definitely incomplete. For some people, OS level support for the complete OpenType spec is irrelevant due to the fact that these same people use Adobe/Quark products which provide the total access to these features.

It would be a good thing if Apple was to finish the work they started with OpenType in the upcoming Leopard so people using apps MS Word, Pages, or even TextEdit can have full access to all of OpenType's goodies.

Mike Diaz :-)

PS... My favorite error message in the world...

guifa's picture

It's interesting the three apps you noted. Word, Pages, and TextEdit all use different engines. Pages and TextEdit's are related, but I've found subtle difference in mark-positioning for instance between the two when I needed to have a tilde over a lower-case q (a common Spanish abbreviation back in the day). TextEdit can do it perfectly. Pages is unable to, and places the tilde to the right of the q (although if I place an a in between the q and ~, it combines the a with the tilde. You can also select the tilde and a independently, kind of cool).

I'm not sure that that's so much of an error as a warning. To my knowledge, there is no standard way to encode glyph variants in documents in any of the go-between formats, eg, if I have a UTF-8 encoded plain text document, I can't actually define a glyph variant. Some programs don't support them, so even if there were a way, they of course wouldn't be able to display it.


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