This page attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the fixes (or lack thereof) of the changes you've put into place to alleviate your font frustrations.
Pixelation, discussed in part one, occurs when fixed-size fonts are scaled. Below are six lines, each rendered at a different size. If you have successfully corrected the pixelation problem, the characters in each line will appear smooth and crisp. If you have not successfully addressed the pixelation problem, some of the characters will appear "blocky".
This line is rendered at size step 1.
This line is rendered at size step 2.
This line is rendered at size step 3 (the default size).
This line is rendered at size step 4.
This line is rendered at size step 5.
This line is rendered at size step 6.
Note that a side effect of disabling font scaling is that different font size steppings may not actually be rendered in different sizes. When Netscape cannot scale a font to a precise size, it chooses the closest available font size. Consequently, adjascent steppings may end-up at the same apparent size.
The font size step rate, discussed in part one, determines how great the size difference between font steppings. By default, font steppings are 20% increments from the default size (size step 3). For instance, a font reduced by one step is 20% smaller than the default font, while a font increased by three steps is 60% larger than the default.
The following table should allow you to get a sense of how much variation there is between different font steppings. For each step, two columns of 10 vertically-stacked M's are given. The left colum is rendered in the default font size (step 3), the right column in the given font size stepping.
| Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5 | Step 6 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
M M M M M M M M M M | M M M M M M M M M M |
Compatibility or alias fonts, discussed in part three, are designed to give alternate names to existing fonts in order to attempt to mimic fonts that aren't othewise available, such as the Microsoft/Agfa TrueType font, Arial, which is roughly equivalent to the Helvetica font included with the X windowing system.
When Netscape enounters a font it doesn't recognize, it renders the text in the default fixed-width font. To verify that a proportional alias font is available and rendering properly, we compare it to the default fixed-width font and the desired target font. The following three lines make this comparison for the Arial alias font:
This line is rendered in the default fixed-width font.
This line is rendered in the Arial font.
This line is rendered in the Helvetica font.