The Lemon Fool

DAK how text rendering is done on computer devices these days. For the purposes of this DAK just the name of the relevant technology or a link will suffice. I'll read the rest.

The reason I ask is sometimes I'll see a bunch of random letters missing as a web page is loading. There is an illustration in this reddit post.

This morning as the Guardian home page was loading (in Firefox Mac desktop) the title was rendered as "The Guar ian" with the just d missing for a second or two. I'm curious as to how this happens. If I were coding the rendering I'd have the letters displayed sequentially but perhaps that is just me



GS

Having consulted Meta AI I'll partially answer the question. Meta AI suggested the likely cause is a font issue, e.g. a font that is dynamically loaded and then some characters are ready before others; it also suggested that "font sub-setting" might be involved and that it might be a GPU acceleration issue.

Looking at the particular Guardian issue, I viewed the HTML source and note that each letter is actually rendered individually in the source code (using a <path> element), so that would explain how some letters appear before others. I think that wouldn't apply in other cases I've experienced where whole swathes of text have missing letters.


GS
EDIT: I'm actually impressed with how Meta AI handled the query. I told it to ask me questions to narrow down the cause which it did. I'm using the version implemented with the web WhatsApp.

GoSeigen wrote:Having consulted Meta AI I'll partially answer the question. Meta AI suggested the likely cause is a font issue, e.g. a font that is dynamically loaded and then some characters are ready before others; it also suggested that "font sub-setting" might be involved and that it might be a GPU acceleration issue.

Looking at the particular Guardian issue, I viewed the HTML source and note that each letter is actually rendered individually in the source code (using a <path> element), so that would explain how some letters appear before others. I think that wouldn't apply in other cases I've experienced where whole swathes of text have missing letters.

Well then for the Guardian case at least it isn't a font issue, 'cos <path> is an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) element, so while the letters look like text they're actually not text but drawn graphics. See https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/svg_path.asp

(By drawing the letters the Guardian can ensure that their logo looks exactly as they want, whereas if they used text then they don't have that control, as the browser may not have the font they'd prefer installed, or may decide to override it anyway.)

[OT]

GoSeigen wrote:
EDIT: I'm actually impressed with how Meta AI handled the query. I told it to ask me questions to narrow down the cause which it did. I'm using the version implemented with the web WhatsApp.

Hmm, it can't play tictactoe though. Definitely no detectable intelligence here, just an ability to remember stuff and string words together. If humans are hoping to achieve something intelligent with this they'd better think again...

GS

GoSeigen wrote:This morning as the Guardian home page was loading (in Firefox Mac desktop) the title was rendered as "The Guar ian" with the just d missing for a second or two.

Maybe they just corrected a misspelling?