Font rendering or scaling issue in Illustrator - irregular letter heights

I get a strange kind of scaling problem for some fonts in Illustrator as well as Photoshop.
For example here is Helvetica Neue Light at 18px. You can see that the letters 'r' and 'v' are the wrong height:
At font sizes above 18px I don't get a problem.
In non-Adobe programs (e.g. Textedit) the font renders OK at all font sizes.
Any ideas?

Yep this is an incredibly annoying Adobe problem - and definitely not just with Helvetica. It's a lot of fonts at a lot of sizes - especially smaller sizes. It also happens with acrobat reader, whereas if you use apple preview the fonts render fine. Totally odd and disappointing.
A somewhat decent workaround I've found is to add a rasterize live effect to the text. This can also help with small text on curved paths - at angles - and also when you resize/rotate/modify an imported image to prevent it from looking like crap. Why it isn't just done automatically I don't know - but I'm happy to have discovered a temp work around at least.
Hope that helps!
//jayse

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Font rendering OS X issues

Hi people,
I baught a MacBook Air and I am new to OS X. I have this machine since 1 month and I simply cannot get used to the font rendering of OS X. I thought I get used to it after a while, but I don't. I feel like I have body lotion in my eyes all the time, fonts are really blurry and I can only work on that machine for some time. On my windows machine I worked all day long, with no such problems, but not in OS X. It is set to native resolution and I already set the font smoothing to 1, but this is still not enough, while turning font smoothing completely off makes everything look very ugly.
I wonder why no one ever mentioned that in reviews, etc.? Does it not bother mac users? However, is there some other option (besides scaling down to lower resolution)? I have headache almost every evening, so this is really a problem to me.
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Do any other applications behave like that? Or just these two?

Font rendering quality in Illustrator is terrible!

What the heck rode Adobe when they implemented the new font engine?
Why, oh why is Apple's font rendering so much better? And why wouldn't Adobe use something that's already readily available on the mac platform?
I have a huge problem mocking up website layouts in Illustrator. Type looks much better in Firefox or Safari. How come, huh?

I believe this is the result of sub-pixel antialiasing (SPAA), which optimizes text appearance on laptops. Illustrator's rasterizing doesn't SPAA, which is fine for most CRTs, print, and LCD displays that might be rotated.
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Okay i was looking fo some back up drives online, and i stumbled upon:
http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Seagate-Barracuda-7200-9-500GB-Internal-Drive-ST3 500641ARK/sem/rpsm/oid/168899/catOid/-12976/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do
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http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4641/picture3rn0.png
http://img218.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture4dr1.png
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hey! well i tried your site url on my MacPro and i have the same issue, so it must be a macpro thing? lol
im running the latest firefox and no additional fonts installed other than the ones you have listed yourself (office, cs2, macromedia)
so dont fret. i tried using font finangler and onyx to clean the font cache, (not sure i fhtat was a good idea,) but it shows up on mine so your not the only one! ive tried on two different macpros one wiht out any programs and it does the same thing. so it must be something with the wya its rendering on these machines.
at first it hought maybe something got corrupted in my system aswell
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Font Rendering Issues-Help Required Please

In the past week, any Google search on Firefox or Chrome (but not Opera) gives me results where the fonts look gappy. Sometimes there are additional dots above the letters. I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox from scratch in case an add-on was at fault but even with a clean install I am still seeing the issue. I checked my font settings and do not have any minimum font size set. I have allow pages to choose their own font ticked.
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<blockquote>After you install security update 3013455, you may notice some text quality degradation in certain scenarios. The problem only occurs on systems that are running Windows Vista SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP2. Microsoft is researching this problem and will post more information in this article when the information becomes available. </blockquote>
<sup>reference: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3013455</sup>
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Last edited by mamciek (2012-11-20 22:01:45)

brebs wrote:https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32612?project=1
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Sent from my iPhone

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Please review this screen shot. Details follow the image.
FB 4.5.1
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Pse wrote:Hmm, looks like the wrong LCD filter is getting picked. What desktop environment are you on? I take it it is not Gnome, is it?
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Hi guys,
I experienced a problem with font rendering in the mentioned applications after upgrading xulrunner from 1.9.2.10-1 to 1.9.2.10-2 today. It seems like font smoothing/subpixel rendering does not work as before. After downgrading to 1.9.2.10-1, it worked as expected again.
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And here is a difference image:
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Although I am empathetic to the hard (and really great) job the arch devs do, I want to voice my overall agreement with softtower on this issue. Fonts have been an off and on problem for me with arch since the beginning. I understand the devs are doing the best they can, especially when the actual problem is with the moz. devs. But fonts are the major way most users interact with the system, and I can tell you that almost nothing is more aggravating, to me at least, to suddenly "upgrade" and get presented with those really crappy fonts out of the blue. Just saying I understand the frustration, and I think he makes some good points about shipping broken packages and "blaming" it on upstream. If they're broken - don't use them! if possible. "Progress" that breaks stuff isn't really progress, imo.
hokasch wrote:
Don't quite get what the fuzz is all about, my fonts look as crisp as ever (on a laptop lcd), the update changed absolutely nothing for me. I never used "fixed" versions of anything, can't really remember how I set up the fonts when I did this installation though (font config advice on the wiki I guess).
It is not the repo's maintainers job to keep packages synced up with any "fixed" packages in AUR, that is your own responsibility, and bitching about it won't help you any.
Just pointing out that comments like these aren't really helpful, imho. So you didn't have the problem - that's good to know, but the "fuzz" is about the fact that some of us *DO* have the problem.
It typically doesn't show up on laptops, btw, only standalone LCDs for some reason (has always been the case for me, at least, with both LCDs and laptops, where the laptop never had the problem). So again, the fuss is that a major usability function got broken from an upgrade that shouldn't get broken, and imo it raises some good, if admittedly difficult to resolve, points, philosophical points, etc. about the packaging and upgrade process,

Font rendering or scaling issue in Illustrator - irregular letter heights

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