Blurry grays in Adium?

[NewSc2]

Although my MBP's LCD isn't perfect, it's been having a really hard time with all of the Idle times in my Adium buddylist. I don't know how to describe it, but I've tried several different desktops and all with the same result (even on white, black desktops).

I'm not sure if it's a result of gray + opaque, but I didn't have this problem with my Powerbook or Macbook. Basically the gray letters have a weird white/red/colored edge, and because the font is so small sometimes the words and numbers are barely readable.

(See attached)

Is this something wrong with Adium or an issue with my LCD? I took a screenshot and opened the file up on my PC and it still looks the same.

 

[NewSc2]

Here's a better example:

 

[panoz7]

It's not you or your MBP... it's Adium, and as far as I can tell it's unavoidable. It seems that adium has trouble dealing with the antialiasing of light text over a transparent background. I've had this same issue on my powerbook, ibook, and macbook.

Here's a screen shot:

 

[NewSc2]

Well, this is how it looks like on my Macbook. I do have colored backgrounds enabled for the Macbook but it's still pretty opaque.

 

[NewSc2]

Actually... I think it is a problem with Adium. Just re-themed my MBP's Adium quite a bit and it looked okay (the antialiasing). I'm going to probably leave it how I had it before, though. Looked better, even with the slight blur.

Are they trying to correct the issue in Adium?

 

[evands]

http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/ReportingBugs is a good way to bring it to the Adium team's attention...

though that said, Adium isn't doing *anything* special to draw text there besides standard OS X methods, generally, so it may be unavoidable in a systemwide sense. The real question is whether you're just seeing it in Adium because you don't have text drawing that way anywhere else... Try setting up a Terminal window with the same font, color, background, and transparency settings -- do you see the same problems?

 

[panoz7]

Try setting up a Terminal window with the same font, color, background, and transparency settings -- do you see the same problems?

A transparent terminal window with the same font, color, transparency settings antialiases the text perfectly:

 

[evands]

That seems like a different font or kerning... the letters are more spaced out, for example, and the color looks like the 82 (second row of the contact list, which looks okay to me) rather than the o36 (third row, which looks bad). Is it just my poor eyesight at work?

 

[panoz7]

It's more clear on my computer... if you look really closely at the edges of the letters you can sort of see it.

I don't know why terminal decided to spread the letters out like that. They're both verdana size 10 though.

 

[evands]

Could you please file a Trac ticket (via the link above) with your description, attaching your images? I don't see an obvious reason this is happening, but it bears more investigation, so it'd be best for the issue not to be lost.

 

[mkrishnan]

I don't know why terminal decided to spread the letters out like that. They're both verdana size 10 though.

It did that because Verdana is not a fixed width font, and many, many text based programs assume fixed-width. So, in Terminal, the look will be severely messed up if you don't use a fixed-width font. Apple compensates by "fixing" the width of a proportional font, so you get spaces... presumably because there are one or two fairly wide characters in that font, and every character has to fit.

And...love it. A response from the horses mouth regarding the original issue! Erm...from the duckie's mouth.

 

[panoz7]

It did that because Verdana is not a fixed width font, and many, many text based programs assume fixed-width. So, in Terminal, the look will be severely messed up if you don't use a fixed-width font. Apple compensates by "fixing" the width of a proportional font, so you get spaces... presumably because there are one or two fairly wide characters in that font, and every character has to fit.

And...love it. A response from the horses mouth regarding the original issue! Erm...from the duckie's mouth.

Cool... you learn something new everyday.

I'll submit a report to adium later tonight. This has never really bothered me though, I usually have a black or constant colored background anyway and turn off the transparency.

 

[panoz7]

Adium X finally reached version 1.0 today. The new version fixes the transparent background text antialiasing issue... it's still not perfect, but at least it is now on par with terminal's transparent antialiasing.