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Comment by gamache | Hacker News Reader

I applaud their effort, but when I look at real documents in both formats (e.g. http://www.scribd.com/documents/5/Paper-5 like ZeroGravitas posted here), the HTML5 version looks very noticeably worse than Flash (tested in Chrome 5, Safari 4, FF 3.6). Fonts are rough or missing, kerning is shot to hell, and layout looks like it was performed on a shake table. It resembles the output of a poor PDF viewer.

I wonder if this was the right time to roll out the HTML5 format.

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I don't know if we're seeing the same thing: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/pictures/scribd.png

That's with FF 3.6.3 on a Mac. That looks pretty damned good to me. I like that much better than the Flash version, party because I think it renders better and partly because it's easier to navigate. The only problem I see is that the text could be darker so that it would pop more.

Yes, good point. I am on Windows XP; you are on Mac and SURPRISE! things look much better for you. I should have mentioned OS in my original post.

http://ftso.net/scribd-chrome5-winxp.gif shows what I am seeing (zoomed in for a little more clarity; it still looks bad at regular size).

Have you tried turning anti-aliasing on? It’s a system level control in Display Properties I believe (though it’s been many years since I used Windows in anger).

Thanks for the feedback. Win XP has a different font renderer than Win 7 which is different than os x's. The fonts look best in win xp with cleartype enabled. We are going to be working on improving the font quality in XP in all modes.

It looks like you don't even have font smoothing enabled which. Enabling that will make a huge improvement cleartype or not.

Thanks for the tips! I never spent much time making XP look better, I mostly just turn off all the piss-me-off stuff the first day I run the machine, and forget it.

I'm glad it was a mixture of XP and PEBKAC causing the output to look bad. Like I hinted before, I am in complete support of your decision to move to HTML5, and I am tickled to see it look so good (on other people's screens ;).

EDIT: Wow, yes, ClearType smoothing really takes care of the font appearance.

I'm on Ubuntu with Chrome:

http://i.imgur.com/qF0xA.png

Can you do screenshot comparisons? I am not seeing these problems and I don't know if it has to do with my browser/OS or because I just don't notice these things.

Also super laggy when scrolling fast over the content. I never see that kind of scroll lag and it was quite apparent while viewing your provided ZeroGravitas link.

I have to say going from a "viewer" to having all the content on the same page is a huge improvement.

Yeah. Even if scrolling is laggy, it's arguably better than having to click "next" for every page.

In order to get that level of display control, they're doing some insane things under the hood with the HTML. It's a tag fiesta in there (understandably -- there's no other way to do it), and complex HTML can put some real demands on the processor -- but nothing compared to the same content in Flash.

In Safari scrolling that document is very smooth. So much better than the Flash Scribd. Kudos.

There is a lot going on under the hood, and we have put substantial work into optimization for things like scrolling through content. We know we can still do better, though, so expect to see things even more performant in the coming weeks!

I was quite impressed by how good it was. There are problems but they are at least not immediately obvious. I’m still not sure, though, whether it’s the right thing to do.

The HTML5 fonts look fine for me (FF 3.6.3, OS X 10.5), but the text overflows the right margin rather badly, and it persists even after resizing. I hope they can work out the kinks.

Mac/Safari 4 Looks perfect. Better then boxed Flash version

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