We have been tweaking the HTML markup that Visual Site Designer generates so that your websites can look as identical as possible on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems. The hurdle we’ve had to overcome is that each operating system renders fonts and text a bit differently. To adjust for that, we switched from writing font sizes in PT format to PX format.

From our initial testing, everything looks great. It also now corrects issues involving increasing your browser font size, too (YEAH!) What I need is for a few people to test this on their site to make sure there’s no unforeseen consequences of this change.

If interested, drop me an email: scott@coffeecup.com

So is it my imagination or does the text render a little sharper? Everything looks good. Some pages that I had a lot of text on render more accurately to the design screen in VSD.

By using PX instead of PT, most likely.

Another good thing is these sites now look the same on a mobile device too....

Hey, that worked for me. No more jumbled fonts!!!!

Bill Belanger

Awesome!! Any one else care to help us out and test this update on your site?

Well I tested the beta and all my jumbled fonts are rendering fine in the three browsers I had issues with. Fantastic! Thanks Scott...

Bill

The change to px seems the right thing. The text remains sharp, even if enlarged by Ctrl+. In the current stable version of VSD the text became pixelated and unsharp if enlarged many times.

As to overlapping: In FireFox, if the text box you draw in VSD has some extra space on the right side, you can enlarge a lot before it starts wrapping. But if the text box is just as wide as your text, it will wrap, and text boxes below each other will overlap if enlarged beyond a certain point. The page width remains the same because of the wrapping.

In the other browsers I tested (IE, Safari, Opera, Chrome, all latest stable versions) the text did not wrap nor overlap, even though the drawn text box was exactly fitting around the text. But the page width was increased because everything was pushed to the right when enlarging.

For this test I scaled up the text quite a lot (and in Opera it seems you can go on forever). In real life I don't know if such a lot of scaling will ever be necessary.

In all five browsers I tested with some text and a shape it displayed exactly the same. Even in Chrome, which usually renders things a bit larger than the other browsers.

I tested the new version on my desktop pc (win7/64) while having the current stable version on my laptop (Vista) for comparison.

Just had a look at my site in IE9 Are you still accepting testers?

I sure am. Just drop me an email.

This is great!!! Even looks normal and zooms just fine in IE9.
Did something else in the code change besides the pts to px? My site loaded super fast, as well as all the pages - even the form popped right up, no waiting. It was faster in every browser I tried, not just IE9

Thanks so much for making these changes!!!!!
Callie