As you can see, I’ve loaded a new stylesheet for this blog. Partially because I just wanted a change, but also partially because this page looks funny on a Mac.
Why, you ask? Well, for some reason Safari likes to do bad things to the text when it’s rendering light text on dark backgrounds. This post actually claims that OSX applies a gamma correction to text before it renders it, which supposedly makes it good for black on white, but not the other way around. Don’t know how true that is, but there is certainly a difference.
Also, it seems that it’s much easier to spot bold text with dark text on a light background.
Why do I care how the page looks on a mac? I’m experimenting with using my mac mini at work as my primary work GUI. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days trying to tweak Ubuntu to look exactly how I want (and I’ve realized significant font rendering gains, more coming on that later) but, in the end, things still aren’t quite right, and I don’t want to spend any more time tweaking things. It just feels more and more pointless when you know that there are other platforms that just get it right from the start.
Anyways, it’s not like I’ve moved completely to OSX (I tried that at work before, but gave up). I’ve just switched to it as my GUI machine, meaning that all my actual editing happens on a Linux machine through ssh, and I still use Outlook in a VMware Fusion virtual machine.