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| Example of pixelation |
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By Steve Coile
As a heavy user of Netscape Navigator under Red Hat Linux, I find myself frequently frustrated with the problems experienced visiting overly-fancy Web page designs and Web pages designed only for Microsoft Windows users related, often because of problems rendering fonts. Unfortunately, these problems occur frequently. On the up-side, I've managed to find ways to alleviate them to an acceptable level. This article discusses several steps that can be taken to improve the Web browsing experience using Netscape Navaigator and Communicator under Red Hat Linux. Much of this material may also be applied to other variants of Linux and UNIX.
The most obvious font problem under Netscape is "blocky" (or "chunky") fonts. This effect is caused by "pixelation": fonts are sized such that their pixels (the individual dots that compose each character) are apparent. At best, pixelized fonts are ugly. At worst, they're unreadable.
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Pixelation occurs when fixed-size fonts are scaled. Many of the fonts provided by the system are of fixed sizes. For instance, the Helvetica font might be available in 10, 12, and 24 point sizes. When the available font sizes don't meet the needs of the application, the application may "scale" the font (adjust its size), for instance, to create a 14 point font from a 12 point font.
To disable font scaling in Netscape, go to "Edit:Preferences:Appearance:Fonts" and uncheck the "Allow Scaling" options for both variable and fixed width fonts.
 | Disabling font scaling in Netscape |
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By disabling font scaling, you force Netscape to use the closest-sized font, rather than scaling an existing font to the desired size. Unfortunately, some Web site designers make layout decisions around the expected size of the text. By preventing Netscape from sizing text exactly, the page appearance may be adversely affected by the unexpectedly-sized text. So the tradeoff decision you have to make is between readable text (without font scaling) and proper layout (with font scaling).
While researching potential font frustration fixes, I stumbled upon several other configuration changes that you might find useful. These were found in a posting by Karsten M. Self in the comp.os.linux.setup newsgroup on June 27, 2000, and by looking through the "Netscape.ad" X resources file distributed with Netscape Navigator.
To apply these changes, edit the ".Xresources" file (formerly ".Xdefaults") in your home directory and add the given configuration lines. After adding all desired configuration, save the changes and exit your text editor. The changes will take effect the next time you login.
Common HTML includes instructions to increase and decrease the size of the fonts used to render text. The size increases are expressed in terms of "steppings" from the default size. How steppings are interpreted is left to the browser to decide. Unfortunately, Navigator and Internet Explorer use different steppings, so that size changes are not consistent between the two browsers. Additionally, Netscape uses a very large stepping factor, resulting in very quick font size growth or shrinkage.
By default, Netscape uses a stepping factor of 20%, meaning that a font reduced in size by one stepping is 20% smaller than the default font, a font reduced two steppings is 40% smaller than the default font, and so on. The stepping factor can be changed by adding the following to your ".Xresources" file:
Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 20
Replacing "20" (the default value) with your preferred stepping factor. You might prefer a value of 10 or even 05 instead. Smaller stepping factors will affect page appearance in two ways: (a) reduced-size text will be larger than it would be otherwise, consuming more screen space, but also remaining more legible; and (b) increased-size text will be smaller than it would be otherwise, using less screen space.
Recent versions of Netscape include several buttons on the tool bar that are more bookmarks than tools, in my opinion. These include the "Netscape", "Security", "Shop", and "Search" buttons. Their location to the left of the "Stop" button forces the "Stop" button off the screen if the Netscape window is narrow, which can be inconvenient.
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| Non-Tool toolbar buttons in Netscape |
These buttons can be disabled by adding the following your your ".Xresources" file:
Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false Netscape*toolBar.viewSecurity.isEnabled: false
These correspond to, in order: the "Netscape" button, the "Shop" button, the "Search" button, and the "Security" button. Note that the security tool access through the Search button is also accessible through the Netscape menu bar by choosing "Windows:Tools:Security Console".
When highlighting text (for instance, to cut and paste), Netscape renders the highlight as black text on a yellow background. Depending on the background color of the Web page and the color presentation of your monitor, this highlight color combination may not provide enough contrast for frequent use. The colors can be changed with the following:
Netscape*selectForeground: White Netscape*selectBackground: Blue
replacing "White" and "Blue" with your preferred color choices (though that particular combination is pretty high-contrast).
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Finally, when Netscape is first started, it displays a "splash screen", which identifies the product and the copyright. After a few moments, the splash screen is replaced by your starting page. The splash screen can also be displayed by choosing "Help:About Navigator" (or "About Communicator") from the Netscape menu bar or by opening the magic URL, about:.
To disable the initial display of the splash screen, add the following to your ".Xresources" file:
Netscape*noAboutSplash: true
As you continue to wander the Web, you'll notice that the suggestions I've given here have alleviated some problems, but not nearly all of them. Part two of this article describes further steps the more advanced user can take to alleviate problems associated with font sizing. Part three describes steps the more advanced user can take to make the system compatible with Microsoft font specifications.