Text settings when designing for web

[wijtten]

Hi, I'm new to the group and glad to be joining your forum.

I have a problem when designing for the web in Illustrator. The text rendering in Illustrator seems to be completely different from any browser or OS rendering. When you are designing for the web in Illustrator and are using (a lot of) text this is of course very annoying.

Does anyone else have this problem, is there a workaround or am i just missing something?

thank you!

Zeno

[d_tekt]

Do you mean the text in Illustrator looks smooth and it's bitmapped/jagged in your browser? I take it you're on a PC and not a Mac?

[wijtten]

Yes, well. With the ie7 rendering, Vista and Xp-cleartype tuner browser text looks quite smooth now however still very different from Illustrator rendered text i.e. the font size, leading as well as tracking are different.
I'm on a PC.

[wijtten]

Allright, I see now that illustrator rendering is the same as Apple's. But this still leaves the problem when designing for the other environments.

[d_tekt]

That's just a difference between web design and design for print. Annoying, but it's the nature of the web. For HTML pages, you either do images for all text (horrendous for accessibility/Google), do Flash Image Replacement (fiddly) or accept it. That's why most people do mock-ups in Photoshop, to get a better preview of bitmapped text.

In PS you can set paragraph text to 'bitmap' and see what it will look like on XP/IE6/whatever. I don't know if Illustrator has a setting like that. You could design your layout then save a different copy and rasterise the text to see the effect.

Only other option is a web-optimised PDF. There you can have everything stay in position and (hopefully!) look the way you want it.

Personally, I'd save graphics as EPS files from Illy and arrange them in PS and add dummy text. From there you can slice them into a layout for Dreamweaver/whatever. More steps but you get a more realistic mock-up.

By the way, isn't the time-out on this website a little harsh? Turn your back to look something up and you're logged out - annoying. :mad: