A number of people have observed curious issues with iCab under Mac OS 8.5 to 9.1; in particular, problems rendering forms and characters getting merged together. Thankfully, the amount of such issues present in iCab is decreasing, significantly so. I am not personally aware of there being too many problems left to resolve under Mac OS 9.1 but I may well be wrong (and Mac OS 8.5 users got a rather worse deal originally at least).

Curiously, even the issues with characters getting merged seems to be absent from the latest beta(s) even though I do not recall that being listed. I think we are getting closer and closer to a fully-working iCab 3 for Mac OS 9. We will get there.

Feel free to report any further problems to Alexander. Since he does not run 9.1 himself (only 9.2.2 and X), he needs accurate descriptions of the various issues involved in order to guess what is the cause of the problem and fix it or develop workarounds.

For reference:

The general target of all finger pointing under Mac OS 8 and 9 is ATSUI, Apple's Unicode engine that services all the text rendering for iCab (for true international text support). One of ATSUI's worst issues is an insistence on spacing letters according to fractional character widths regardless of whether the GUI is using ClearType-style (i.e. SuperMegaFuzzy) anti-aliasing. Under X this is no issue (the spacing that is, not the fuzzy text) but under 9, ATSUI renders text with ugly spacing that impairs legibility. ATSUI's general bugginess under Mac OS 8 and 9 is also blamed for other text display anomalies (e.g. typing 'o' then '/' showing a Norwegian ø char) and all manner of page display errors, especially those which are absent from iCab under X. It has been argued that the reason for ATSUI only doing fractional character widths is because ATSUI was intented for print work only, but if that is so, how is one expected to see and edit what they are going to print? Mac OS revolutionised WYSIWYG editing after all! I guess that the rest of the bugs were from a lack of testing owing to people either using WorldScript/WASTE for international text support (WorldScript is Apple's own international text system) or not caring about international text at all.

-- DanielBeardsmore - 14 Feb 2005, revised 15 Aug 2005

There is a hinting built into Apple's fonts (from OS 8.5 onwards). To improve text rendering, you can try to replace them with the versions from OS 8.1 or earlier, or (my recommendation) use the fonts that come with Internet Explorer as your default fonts for web browsing. Or both.

While using alternative fonts does not switch off the fractional character widths, it does switch off both the substitution effects and the hinting built into ATSUI fonts. The latter will often make them look better on screen - the Microsoft fonts definitely look better spaced, for example.

-- Lee