Derek and Melissa’s Family

iWeb Typography

by Derek—2006.01.27 @ 1018

One of the first things I noticed with Apple’s new iWeb program was the typography control, or lack thereof. When my brother published his site, I noticed some of his text was rendered as graphics, while some was not. At first I thought this was a cool feature, especially if you used a hideous font that no one else would have. But now it looks like Apple needs to provide some extra support for user-controled font rendering.

When I published my own iWeb-created site and uploaded it to my own server, I noticed that text on one page was completely rendered as a graphic, while other text was not. After reading similar reports on Apple’s Discussion Board, I went in search of a solution. In the end, however, I could not find any workaround. My proposal to Apple is this:

1. For each text box, provide user-controlled font rendering:

   • Render as text
   • Render as graphic
   • Automatic rendering (default)

2. Allow users to modify typography on templates, especially on the blog sites

3. Allow users to control the typography on the menu

Right now, there is no rhyme or reason on how text is rendered as graphics or as text. On my test page, I tried everything I could think of and still got random results. The iWeb Help page says to use fonts in the “Web” collection (e.g., Times, Arial, Verdana, etc.), however this does not work as described. I found that even custom fonts work (or not).

On my test page, I used Lucida Grande and Helvetica Nueu which are not “standard” web fonts.

I tried splitting text into smaller boxes.

I tried different font styles (e.g., character spacing, line spacing, uppercase).

I tried copying text boxes that worked and adding text.

As you can see, the results are random (at least it appears to be so). One good bit of news is that drag-and-drop text is wonderfully supported. I tried dragging a listing from the dictionary and it came across perfectly:

As I mentioned in my review, iWeb is targeted at non-web designers, so whether the fonts turn into large graphics or not, the user probably doesn’t care. In fact, they probably are happy to know that their page looks like what they intended. However, in the long term, I feel this “feature” needs an upgrade to allow user control of font rendering.

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