If they are using design software (inDesign, Illustrator), it shouldn’t matter what platform they’re on — the kerning should be the same on each platform. If they’re using Microsoft software (on either platform), it’s a crapshoot. Some MS software doesn’t recognize kerning and some has it turned off by default. You can go into the MS help system to see how to turn on kerning (I’d imagine it could be different from one program to the next).

It’s hard to know what the issues are without knowing anything other than you saying it is terrible or poor quality. There’s nothing about PCs that creates inherently bad type, particularly when you’re using an Adobe application which (and Tom will correct me if I’m wrong) doesn’t even use the built-in type engine on either the Mac or the PC. Type set in InDesign should look exactly the same regardless of which platform you’re running the program on. The only difference could be the fonts themselves, the skill of the students, or something in the printers or print drivers that causes lower-quality output than you expect (which may be a situation specific to the computer lab setups on your campus — I certainly don’t see any difference in type quality on my laser or inkjet printers between my Mac and PC).

Maybe you should have students with bad type send you a PDF or the file itself so that you can see what’s happening and correct them.

Hey Irene - the quality of a font has nothing to do with the platform. Indesign is - HAS to be - absolutely identical in terms of word/letterspacing on both systems. We’re producing material on both systems and constantly work on Windows and OSX and the design is not affected in the very least.

MS Word, Powerpoint and such, of course are NOT Designtools and shouldn’t be treated as such. They are office software and pretty good for that - writing a letter, a postdoctoral thesisor maybe doing a bit of calculating in Excel - but they’re absolutely not up to real design work. They can be, anything can be used for design... but they are very very limited and you have to work not with, but against the software.

But other than that it makes no difference whatsoever. Our studio has been working with Windows for the past 15 years or so - and it doesn’t matter at all. We’re only just now switching back to Apple because it seems that Vista - and Windows 7, which has been teased a short while ago - isn’t doing for us what it’s supposed to and OS X is better suited for our needs. XP, however, was a rather solid operational system.

There is no difference whatsoever between the different platform versions of professional design applications, and now with OpenType, the fonts are also cross-compatible. If the corralation exists between the quality of the work and the choice of platform, it’s probably an inverse one, where those who are more serious about design pick the platform that happens to be more popular among other designers.
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Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

There two things involved with good type reproduction. A decent graphics program (Adobe) and original fonts with the proper metrics—not rip-offs. I would stay away from MS fonts.

I second everybody else: this is an issue caused by the PC users using bad fonts or bad software. My design teachers solved this problem by mandating the use of Indesign or Quark and pointing out bad fonts when they appeared on the wall.

Thank you for the input! I just needed to hear that people are working on both platforms and getting the same results. I always thought/knew that this was the case and I needed to hear this. I am telling you I can look at 25 assigments on a crit wall and pick every single project created on a PC because of the type quality.

I will check MS Word on the PC to see if kerning defaults to on or off. Thanks for this tip.

I think it is going to be difficult to get to the heart of the problem in my Intro To Type class since people are using any programs they own to fulfill their assignments on the PC. I suspect Word is being commonly used and Excel or Powerpoint are not. I explain that Word is just for creating documents and not for design but I have many MS students who are game designers or web designers that are taking the class to learn about type but are not willing to commit to purchasing Adobe design programs.

My students do not have access to a computer lab so all work is done off campus on personal computers and is output on all types of printers. I don’t have control over the fonts they use and I cannot require them to purchase fonts or programs like InDesign.

However, this semester I am teaching a print design class in which they are required to use InDesign so that will be one common denominator for both platforms. I suspect many students are using MS fonts as they work at MS or they are using fonts that are preloaded with the computer. I will have some identical design projects created using both platforms and that will be interesting to compare, BUT they will still be using their own fonts as I cannot distribute fonts for their use. I understand the equation for success (Adobe and proper quality fonts) but I also need to give them as much as possible to succeed with what they are working with. A compromise, for sure.

I need to see if Adobe offers any free Open Type fonts for use. This would eliminate the second variable for the Print Design class. Then it will be interesting to see the quality of the projects and the type.

Thanks -
irene

Could it be that the Mac users have some pre-existing graphics design experience / expertise which allows them to trump default settings in InDesign?

When the A320 or 737 goes down it’s usually pilot error?

Technically the apps are the same, the fonts are the same - how about the output devices, are the printers the same?

If you can’t get the students to buy Indesign or Quark, there’s always Scribus. Of course, that might not go over well with the Microsoft crowd anyway, but I digress…

Is there a need for computers in an intro-to-type class?
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

BTW, if they don’t want to buy professional design software, you can tell them to download open-source options like InkScape and Gimp.

_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

Ask your PC using students which software they are using, not just which machine. I would bet the PC users with bad looking type are using office softyware or even worse, Powerpoint. Adobe software gives good results on both platforms. Also, find out which printer are being used. Postscript laser printers give good results. The others can be a crapshoot.

ChrisL

In this intro-to-type class we do almost everything by hand. There are 2 assignments where 1/2 the assignment is done on the computer - The kerning exercise is done by hand and then created on the computer to introduce computer kerning skills. The grid exercise is done by hand and then I bridge with the computer to set a headline and example of the body copy. Given the makeup of these students, I would have a mutiny if computers did not come into the class structure, even in an intro class. These are tech people in a class taught 10 miles from the main Microsoft campus and 2 miles from Expedia. If I can get any of these people to kern their type, improve their visual aesthetics and make educated type choices then I have done my job with this group. If they continue on with me for additional classes then they must use InDesign.

Believe me, my type and design classes at design schools are much easier than this school. I am just trying to work within the PC world and give them tools and knowledge that work and that produce good typography.

InkScape and Gimp, I will introduce these. Should be interesting.

It sounds like the bad typesetting is coming from students using MS Word or Publisher or something even worse from Microsoft. I use both Macs and PCs, and with apps like Pagemaker, Quark and InDesign results are identical from Mac and PC.

There is a way of getting MS Word to space things properly—install Acrobat (not the reader, the full editor proggy) and Acrobat Distlller, then print Word .DOCs with Acrobat as the virtual printer. Results are much better than the same .DOC printed natively.

j a m e s

Thanks James I will try this.

Irene, If you’d like to drop by with some samples (print outs and source files) we can try to work out what’s going on. Feel free to contact me off-list to set up a time - simonda@microsoft.com

With MS Office apps, kerning is OFF by default, on both Mac and Windows versions. So the first thing you need to do with students using those apps is teach them how to turn on kerning. (PowerPoint couldn’t even do kerning until Office 2007/2008, btw.)

Cheers,

T

FYI: Kerning is on by default in PPT 2007.

I don’t know if it was mentioned before, but:
the printer driver might be old, or does not supporting the printer or the system, ...

if all students are printing in the same network with the same printers, this might cause that they all get crap on paper. OSX-users would be immune because they might get an other, possibly better driver from the network when installing the printer on their system.

The defaults for H&J in american software (and isn’t it all US-made?) are awful. Wordspaces you can drive a truck thru, Letterspacing auto-applied to fill out lines, stretching and squooshing at will — it all happens with this stuff right out of the box.

So fix that first.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

One more comment on the topic of fonts, the core MS fonts aren’t bad (indeed, they were some of the first really high-quality TT fonts made), but they’re generally optimized for screen use, not for print. That’s actually an interesting topic you could explore with the students, given that many work at MS (or have friends/family who do).

They probably won’t take kindly to you just saying “MS fonts suck, don’t use them” (particularly since they might know enough to know that isn’t true), but discussed in the context of how different type is optimized for different uses (display, subheads, screen) you can gently point out that the MS fonts are excellent for on-screen use but generally not for print other than generic office documents. And if people bring in assignments with MS fonts you can use the opportunity of them being blown up big to show where screen design decisions look less than elegant on large type.

Regarding MS fonts, when people buy a PC with any MS OS preloaded then the computer is preloaded with MS fonts? Are any of the fonts from other foundries?

In my design studio we use the Mac platform and purchase quality fonts. In the business world we are in the minority as a Mac users as most of the world uses a PC. Pagemaker, Quark and Publisher provided the ability for companies to create in-house design departments and they use PCs most of the time. These same departments will use Word, Publisher, and PPT to create print and presentations. People in most jobs that are using a PC use the fonts preloaded into their computers for print, not just screen display. This is how the majority of the business world operates.

In this specific into-to-type class I truly think that students are using a combination of using Word and Publisher for their print projects, they use the default settings for these programs, and MS fonts on a PC. I need to find settings beyond the defaults and ways to create good typography produced within this set of parameters, if possible. I can teach the understanding of quality fonts, the concept of purchasing fonts, and the concepts of good typography but I also need to learn ways to teach and work within their framework to guide them to success. Should they decide to continue their studies beyond this class then InDesign comes next.

These students use different PCs, different MS OS systems, each uses their own printers be it a laser or inkjet, they all use their own programs which are probably different versions. The common denominator would be the use of preloaded fonts (MS?) that came with their OS system.

I think the use of the software (Word, etc.) is more to blame than MS fonts, they look pretty good although they generally don’t include typographic niceties — just the required glyphs for many languages & scripts. A couple InDesign related comments:
1) We do package InDesign and the various suites with some OpenType fonts. Each release had some differences, so I can’t remember exactly which fonts you’ll get. Some of the stuff might not be installed, but may be on the disks. One of the “register your software” incentives was also a whole font family. (Thomas Phinney’s Hypatia Sans Pro, I think for CS3.)
2) This American company doesn’t ship with H+J defaults that allow letterspacing. :>

“MS fonts”

Simon may disagree on semantic grounds, but there is no such thing as “MS fonts”. Microsoft is not a font foundry. Fonts that we may associate with MS products are simply those that MS has licensed from originating foundries or commissioned from individual designers/foundries, for bundling with the OS or apps. For example, Gill Sans is available retail in many formats for all platforms. The only thing we could now consider exclusive to MS products are the new fonts accompanying Vista, with C names, but then again, those are also available retail and not really exclusive.

This means that there is nothing about the fonts that will cause the discrepancy in quality that you are seeing.

What does make a very visible difference is the application being used. MS applications (various versions) tend to mess up default spacing, ignore kerning, and the worst offenders are Word and PowerPoint. I’ve found that the highest-quality fonts end up looking mangled in those apps, and I consider them sub-standard for any design task. Not to mention how difficult they are to work with in terms of fine typographic control.

You might use this quality difference in the class as a lesson; to show how certain apps can set type, but not expertly. Some apps are not made to handle design work, and you can show them the gappiness, spacing problems and lack of kerning as examples of this.

Totally agree - in fact we licensed the core fonts and Web fonts to Apple, so they’re shipping essentially the same fonts as we do with Windows, with the notable exception of the ClearType Collection fonts.

And the app defaults are likely the culprits here, and as we’re neighbors (and as my people are paying to attend your course) I’m more than happy to review files and output to see what might be going wrong.

I need to see if Adobe offers any free Open Type fonts for use.

Check your InDesign / Illustrator DVDs! There are a lot of superior quality fonts included with the package. I don’t remember offhand if they get installed or not by default as I never use the default install options :-)

The fonts range from book faces (Minion, Garamond) to complete sans families (Myriad) to familiar (Trajan, Lithos) to Rosewood, and a great range of CJK designs (you can make great logotypes with’em!).

As for print quality: having written more than one program that required to print from Windows, it always bothered me the virtual canvas you’re drawing onto has the printers’ resolution. That doesn’t sound ominous, but think again: everything (text positioning, line width, bitmap graphics) has to be rounded towards the printer’s rez, and if you change printers you have to rebuild the entire image.

Like it or not: Showing your students how they can achieve good quality with the given programs, OSes and fonts, means that you might have to touch a PC for the first time, try to use the tools they use with all your professional experience in typography and graphics design, and find out what can be achieved.
But be prepared: while the Adobe apps will behave as you are used to, “design tools” like word, powerpoint, publisher (URGH!) are quite different to use...

Eric wrote: Each release had some differences, so I can’t remember exactly which fonts you’ll get.

Here is some detailed information:

• Fonts that ship with Adobe Creative Suite 3
• Fonts bundled with Creative Suite 2 (and individual CS2 products)
• Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite by Richard Rutter

Type-designing education, as I see and do it, ’requires’ teaching about the composition systems, down to the niddy-gritty. I wonder why people don’t feel the same about designing-with-type education (graphic design)? Doesn’t it seem, because the Mac does a lot of things right by default, (or loses the options altogether;), that students among others, do not really understand the composition mechanism?
So, yeah, let ’em loose on a Windows machine, where the defaults are set to protect pre-Cambrian Windows documents from “ReFlow”, (among other things, even in the authoring of “new documents”)... and poof!, you have an education issue, (a billion dollar book too, “Windows Type for Dummies”.

SII “...with the notable exception of the ClearType Collection fonts.” Have you seen these on the Mac?

Cheers, and good luck!

One of my pet peeves is that kerning is off by default on Word. I believe it’s also off in Publisher. I really don’t understand why ’reflow’ is such an issue that kerning has to be off for the next thousand years. If there is a note when the changeover is made, and information in the ’help’, what is the issue?

The latest version of Word comes with all kinds of interface changes, putting a big learning burden on all users, so I really don’t see why learning to uncheck a box for older style flow is such a burden.

Maybe there’s something I am missing here, but this policy seems pointlessly irrational and hostile to good typography.

Likewise, why doesn’t Adobe fix Illustrator to have contextual alternates ON by default like the spec says and like InD does? Enough time has gone by for them to fix the damn default, already.

ChrisL

>Have you seen these on the Mac?

Yes, they seem to perform just as well as other off-the-shelf OpenType fonts. Understandable that they don’t look quite as good in InDesign and under Quartz as they do under the environments for which they were designed.

Word could turn on kerning for “new documents” without breaking existing ones.

Note that Apple hasn’t turned on kerning in Safari due to performance issues*.

Cheers, Si

* via http://opentype.info/blog/2008/06/14/kerning-and-opentype-features-in-fi... - “We are also interested in eventually adding kerning and ligature support to WebKit (possibly only at larger font sizes, since the benefit at smaller font sizes is not worth the performance hit).”

Dunno about anyone else, but I find the second huge improvement with Word output (after going through switching on kerning), is in documents with any fully-justified paragraphs, switching on the well-hidden and nattily-named Compatibility setting “Do full Justification like WordPerfect 5.x”, which overrides Word’s crap justification algorithm in favour of a much better one...
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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.

@chris

I think that Adobe keeps Illustrator in a state of permanent brokenness so that people buy upgrades in hope that the bugs are fixed.

James, I don’t care if Adobe adds a single new pizazz feature. I just wish they would fix the damn thing so it works like it should and works with all unicode standards and features.

ChrisL

>Word could turn on kerning for “new documents” without breaking existing ones.

Good solution. Will it be implemented soon, then?

I can’t say for sure, but PowerPoint turning it by default was a step in the right direction.

Cheers, Si

I hope I understand your problem correctly. I am a designer that uses a PC just as often as a mac. The one thing your students will have to learn is just to be aware of these differences. Maybe ask them which programs they are using and find out what they have in common. In the end, if they learn good design, they will learn how to pick these problems out themselves and fix them. The platform should have nothing to do with bad quality

Just for the record though, as a senior in college, I now even go as far to right my term papers in InDesign, just because I have more control over the type. I guess that’s how you can pick a designer’s term paper out of the bunch.

SII: “Yes, they seem to perform just as well as other off-the-shelf OpenType fonts.”

You have a truly remarkable and unshakeable sense of quantity.

“Word could turn on kerning for “new documents” without breaking existing ones.”

Someone should tell ’em, QUICK! Change the defaults before billions of more documents spew out compatible to nothing qualitatively lovable. oops, too late.

”...PowerPoint turning [kerning on] by default was a step in the right direction.”

How long ¡did! it take to figure out that presentations don’t much reflow? ;)

I s’pose we should be sacrificing to the god of any improvement, but I burned up all my baby agates on the altar when progress made it to human readable file names.

Cheers!

>Someone should tell ’em, QUICK!

For sure, I’ll tell them. And let you know what they say.

Cheers, Si

I just wanted to thank everyone for the responses to my post. Your input has been invaluable and very much appreciated. M a h a l o.

Rober Trogman Wrote:

There two things involved with good type reproduction. A decent graphics program (Adobe) and original fonts with the proper metrics—not rip-offs. I would stay away from MS fonts.

I Reply:

Just another sheep drinking the Kool Aid. How can you say stuff like that and not just laugh at yourself? I am not wrong in reading what he is saying, only Adobe products produce quality work? Robert what are good metrics? Just ones not ripped off?
Good typography has less to do with fonts and programs than the end user. This line of thinking also just bolsters the way for upgrade after useless upgrade and buying new is the best. I’ll put up my URW Futura vs any on the market, why do I have to buy a new OTF versions? So I can work in Illustrator instead of Freehand?
PLinc had a way of rotating individual letters, and we can’t even come close, but I’m supposed to buy upgrades that I’m not going to use?

Irene, you should find a good starter set of fonts for both platforms and figure a good list of programs that can be used.

Adobe makes fine products and fonts, but can we get real that there are products out there that have a proven track record of quality?

The Truth shall set you free

Rodrigue Planck Wrote:

“I’ll put up my URW Futura vs any on the market, why do I have to buy a new OTF versions? So I can work in Illustrator instead of Freehand?”

YES, I agree. Personally, I will never upgrade to any program that does not support post script fonts. I already have well over $20,000 invested in post script fonts with a collection that began in the 80’s and I will not be replacing fonts I already own with OTF versions. I want to keep moving forward and purchasing new typefaces. I doubt that foundries will replace my PS fonts with OTF versions as a courtesy. Or will they?

Changing programs to only support OTF does not work for me on any level.

This endless cycle of upgrading software gets tiring and expensive, especially when you are not using all the features. I remember playing with a beta version of Photoshop and Illustrator. I started with a Mac Lisa and owned version 1.0 of many programs. I could probably own two nice houses for the amount I have spent on software licenses and computers for my studios. By the way, I am not that old, I just started my career when I was very young.

All the designers I know feel are at this place:
We own the software, it serves all our needs, we know all the features and how to use them, it all works, it is all compatible with each other and our OS, everything prints, the programs don’t crash, and we can get our work done and make our deadlines. That is the perfect scenerio. Once we reach this point we think very long and hard about making any software changes and usually take a pass.

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. On positive side is the ability to set type myself and not have to spec body copy for annual reports hoping it will fit... but I am an artist and I love putting hand to paper. I liked to ink logotypes and custom lettering, I liked the small nuances in each letter that I created with my sweeps and templates. It made me feel close to my work. It is difficult to feel that emotion when pulling handles in vector programs. I am not a typesetter, but I set type. Do I miss my typesetter who set the most stunning Berthold type? Yes, everyday. He was a true artisan.

PS fonts dont work in illustrator!?

-

www.nunocoelho.com

I am not against compeling new, but I am against, as Dan Margulis called it, “The upgrade from marketing.”
To believe that ones work is made better only by the latest and greatest is buying into the idea that the tools are what makes the artist and not vice versa. If I use InDesign 1.5 and get good results from it and I can find a place that will accept it, who cares? If I have to do some extra steps to photos, instead of what is automated in the latest Photoshop, so what?
Berthold fonts were very nice, we had a diatronic, and it produced the nicest letters I ever saw, up to a point, which I can’t remember off hand! The diatronic though, was not a good or reliable production machine. Type houses had this advantage, people working day in day out with software for years learning the software, getting to know its weaknesses and strengths and playing up to both, and upgrades being real upgrades.

The Truth shall set you free

My point was why update to OTF, so I would have to switch to Illustrator because Freehand doesn’t really utilize OTF, and considering my investment in ps fonts is older, but no less useless, why upgrade to change flavor slightly with no gain. My car doesn’t have power windows or leather seats, but why switch if its working for me, is the new car really that much better or am I being hyped by a sales pitch. Cars do what cars do, fonts are the same.

Sii: “For sure, I’ll tell them [that kerning should be on in word, etc. by default]. And let you know what they say.”

The answer came back, the same as it’s always been: ’there is a performance issue’. This is not only too vague for help, but it assumes, I think rather blithely, that the prepress performance issues trump the post-press performance issues. The real task is to improve the results of reading. Who cares if it takes 10, 30 or 60 seconds to recompose the page numbers of a table of contents, if the kerning saves 1,000 readers 1 second per page reading a 60 page document?

Cheers!

Performance issue?

I have a hard time making sense of that.

They already have kerning in the program—you just have to check a box, and it works fine. What’s the ’performance issue’ with having a box checked vs unchecked when you open a new program?

Also:

They’ve just changed the format from .doc to .docx. So why not have .docx open default with kerning on, whereas the old .doc format—which has to be converted anyway—keep kerning off?

“Performance issue? I have a hard time making sense of that.”

You write therefore you are? Sense, like a 1000 page page document open to the first page and the user edits the fourth word of the document to be five letters longer, causing reflow of the whole document, recomposition of the TOC, foot notes, and etc. with, vs. without kerning. Get It?

Cheers!

I understand the issue that they don’t want old documents to automatically reflow. I was writing about Si’s proposal of only opening *new* documents with kerning default ’on’. I don’t understand why with new documents default kerning causes any problem.

But maybe you are being ironic. I still don’t yet understand Berlonese well enough to tell. I think I need your text color coded or something :)

The Office team sent me a detailed reply, and I forwarded parts of it to David. Office didn’t give me permission to post the details to a public forum. Sorry. I’d be happy to share some additional details off-list if you’re interested.

Irene also dropped by last week, and we looked at where to turn on kerning, hyphenation etc., in Office apps and how to quickly tell if a font has kerning that Office apps will apply. Also provided some suggestions as to which fonts her students should use (ie avoiding the Web and UI fonts supplied with our products).

Bill,
After you make an edit, Word reflows the document. If kerning is on, it takes Word longer to reflow the document each time you edit, not just when you first update the software. There is some computer time required to kern after reflow. This is greater than with kerning off. Microsoft seems to feel that this additional few seconds is of greater marketing value than being able to sell kerning to the many users who don’t even understand what kerning does. It seems Microsoft is more interested in on-screen issues than reading printed document issues. Microsoft is a computer company, not a publisher so they err on the side of geekdom instead of readerdom.

ChrisL

Chris, thanks, I get it now—the additional computing may take enough additional time that it slows down the program.

But how much time is involved really? Is it even noticeable with the vast majority of documents? And isn’t formatting off-screen stuff normally shifted to when you are not inputting, if there is demand on displaying the current page?

Also they are already selling kerning, as that is an option in the program. It is just a question of defaults.

I am curious, Si. I am at: Berkson at mentsh dot com .

Welcome to the strange “smoke and mirrors” world of “perf” :-) It really doesn’t matter how fast a machine is or how noticeable the delay is, what the engineers look for are regressions in performance from feature to feature - so if the document took 0.002ms to reflow with kerning off and 0.003ms to reflow with kerning on that would still be significant to them - it’s 50% slower.

Not just engineers concern but marketing too. I refer again to Apple’s Dave Hyatt comment on kerning in Safari - and cross reference it to this capture from www.apple.com/safari/ - turning kerning on might move the needle to 2.10 or 2.11 for Safari - which is very important to people who make pretty colored charts.

Well, there is cost and benefit. Looking only at percentage increase in cost (here time) and not actually the significance of end user cost *and* benefit—documents that look better and save money by being shorter—doesn’t sound to me like great engineering.

“But how much time is involved really?”

That, is the question I’ve been asking for years now.

Sii, we don’t care about Safari. With it’s 1:1 ratio of reader to refresh it’s on this thread’s Pluto.

I am concerned for decision-making based on this kind of thought stream:
”...the engineers look for [] regressions in performance from feature to feature - [] if the document took 0.002ms to reflow with kerning off and 0.003ms to reflow with kerning on [] - it’s 50% slower”
Ahem...u.u..what is o.ooıms? Does that stand for a millionth of a second, or ı/ıoooth of a millionth of a second? I’m the first one to embrace concepts like “not a moment too soon” or “wait a second” but how much time’r we talkin’ about here?

Cheers!

“But how much time is involved really?”

That, is the question I’ve been asking for years now.

Sii, we don’t care about Safari. With it’s 1:1 ratio of reader to refresh it’s on this thread’s Pluto.

I am concerned for decision-making based on this kind of thought stream:
”...the engineers look for [] regressions in performance from feature to feature - [] if the document took 0.002ms to reflow with kerning off and 0.003ms to reflow with kerning on [] - it’s 50% slower”
Ahem...u.u..what is o.ooıms? Does that stand for a millionth of a second, or ı/ıoooth of a millionth of a second? I’m the first one to embrace concepts like “not a moment too soon” or “wait a second” but how much time’r we talkin’ about here?

Cheers!

ms=millisecond=1/1000th of a second

It was a made up number - trying to illustrate that in this world - which I agree is not so in touch with reality - its the percentage change in time that is of concern not the actual time.

Cheers, Si

The proper way would be, “it’s just 0.001 ms slower”.

One thousand of a second is a microsecond; so 0.001 ms is one thousand of one thousand ms, a microsecond. That would be a typical single instruction speed in, oh, let’s look it up: around 1947. When approaching the 60s, computers dipped under the 1μs limit (http://www.digital60.org/birth/manchestercomputers/museandatlas/).

A modern CPU typically runs with multiple cycles in the nanosecond (ns) range. Usually, the number of instructions per second are given — its speed in megahertz (millions of cycles per second), or rather gigahertz (billions of’em). So, for my dual core 2.99GHz chip, the most basic instruction takes 1/2.99 billionth of a second, which is (hold on .. calculator sez) .0000000003 of a second, which is 0.0003 microseconds.

Apparently there are thousands of extra instructions in Safari per performance unit. Let’s hope they’re all useful.

Ooooookay. So performance is not this issue then. It’s a lack of typographically adult supervision.

Good luck Sii!

Cheers.

... and happy 12th of July, I hope it is 300% better than the 4th.

Cheers!