Optimizing For Legibility With Text-Rendering

When it comes to web design, lack of typographic control is one of the greatest challenges that many designers face. Choosing the right typographic features is the foundation for quality web design results.Poor choices will always lead to appalling results, and will be obvious to those who know what to look for.

The good news is that the level of control developers enjoy has been on the rise over the past few years.This has led to enhancement in typography, improving the quality of work done by designers. It is also worth noting that different tools of higher quality have also come into play helping to deliver greater quality results, although these are still low in quality and especially considering different applications that are able to provide quality results including letter modification when necessary. Text-tendering property is one of the best yet little known tool that you should know about.

When planning to use text tendering property, it is important to know that it is not a CSS and therefore not available in any of the CSS specifications. Text-tendering is a SVG property but its use is almost the replica of the CSS property. The best and most imperative thing to note however, that using a sole line of a CSS could go a long way in doing away with many unwanted imperfections from your text.  When using the text-rendering property, it is important to understand the 4 available settings available. Namely:

  • GeometricPrecision: This focuses on defined rendering
  • OptimizeSpeed: This is specifically made to focus on speed
  • Auto: This is meant to enable the browser to select the ideal setting automatically
  • OptimizeLegibility: This concentrates mainly on sophisticated rendering for improved web designs

Despite the availability of these settings, the default “Auto” setting works well to enhance speed instead of decipherability. This is analytical of a banner finalized by the web developers instead of designers. In addition, the optimizeSpeed setting might not be very necessary, especially for people who are not involved in the production of sizeable pages. However, web designers producing many pages will fill find these settings to be amazing.

OptimizeLegibility is actually suitable if you are producing a few pages. You will find GeometricPrecision to be especially ideal when it comes to some texts. And although text-rendering is not defined in CSS, it is worth noting that certain browsers such as WebKit and Gecko allow you to apply this property to XML and HTML content on Linux, Mac, Windows and OS X. When using the text-rendering properties, one of the most notable effects is that characters smaller than 20pixels and in different fonts such as Candara, Calibri and Corbel can be ligatured for optimal display in different browsers.

If you would like to find out more information about Raleigh web design you could go to clickoptimize.com. Here I found some helpful information while writing this article.

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