FacitWeb, occupying the top row of each screenshot, has a 120px capital R, a 21px subhead, and 12px text. The screenshots below were taken by visiting this test page that features two Typekit fonts, FacitWeb and Minion Pro. Let’s examine screenshots of web type as rendered by each of these APIs, and talk about the application independence of rendering engines. APIs such as Core Text on Mac OS X, and DirectWrite and GDI on Windows, are examples of these components and are responsible for rasterizing fonts’ vector outlines. We are all familiar with operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X, but within each OS are smaller, specialized components available for use by applications like web browsers. Read the first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and final posts.Īs we dig into type rendering on the web, we’ll begin by looking at text rendering engines. This is our second post in an ongoing series about type rendering on the web.
