I have stumbled across this site and your program because I was (I never thought I’d use past tense in this context) on the lookout for a program that finally satisfies my writing needs. I am very surprised to see a pre-release already so close to my ideal, but I need some more time to play around with it. But on the whole, it looks very, very promising to me.
One thing I cannot help but notice is that the font looks fuzzy to me. This is puzzling and slightly distracts from the otherwise clean presentation of what I am writing (BTW the full screen is awesome). The text looks as though no antialiasing was going on and looks worse than Textedit or even, gasp, Word.
Am I paranoid or is there a technical explanation for it? Or even better a cure.
There is absolutely no technical reason for this. Scrivener uses the exact same text rendering system as TextEdit and most Cocoa program. That is to say, that text is rendered using Cocoa’s NSTextView. True, Scrivener uses a subclass (ie. an altered version), but I do nothing with the fonts. Fonts look fine on my screen.
That said, if you are zooming in and out of text, it is possible that fonts may get fuzzy at some zoom levels, but it shouldn’t be too bad and it’s to be considered normal.
This may be a “grandmother sucking eggs” answer, but have you tried changing the font? Perhaps it is just that the default Courier New font doesn’t play well on your monitor (it is quite a “weak” font).
Thanks for the kind words about the rest of the app.
You did go into your system preferences (the light switch) and set the Font Smoothing to match the monitor you have?
As I understand it fonts work better with X12 point sized multiples than they do with x5 or X10 percentage multiples. So 100% should always be the indicator for a font’s ‘sharpness’. If fonts are not rendering properly at say 110% they may be either faulty or showing shadow edges of tiny dots.
Courier is better than Courier New (which is rarely ever properly black - it tends to be a dark grey font) when rendered with cocoa. Esoteric, I know, but perhaps you could try magnifications close to multiples of 12 point. 12 point = 100%. 13 point = 110.83333. 14 point = 111.6666, and so on. The maths are really irrelevant. The point is there is not a perfect correlation between point size and decimal magnifications. So fonts that have not been properly alaised are always a bit iffy.
The Final Draft people developed their own version of Courier and it seems to work quite well with percentage magnifications.
Can you capture this problem in a screen shot? It sounds like what you are describing is a text rendering glitch that I have never seen outside of some Carbon applications, and all Classic apps. It would produce a block or two of text a lot like you described. Chunky and fuzzy at the same time. Refreshing the screen somehow would fix it.
Think this problem is impossible in a Cocoa application, but perhaps you have a bad font, or a bitmap font that you are trying to use at a non-native size.