Archive for the ‘OS X’ Category

A Simple Safari Multiple-Column Text Rendering Bug Fix

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

In Safari Version 5.0.5 (6533.21.1) on the Mac, using CSS3 to generate multiple columns can lead to truly ugly artifacts if the last line before a column break contains prominent descenders. These are the portions of a lowercase g, j, p, q, or y that project below the “baseline” of your text.

Apparently, for some fonts and column widths, Safari will crop the bottoms off of these letter forms and display them at the top of the next column as if they were projecting down from an otherwise invisible line of text sitting above the actual column in your layout.

This effect can be suppressed by increasing the line height of your text to trigger this “rendered text image wrapping” bug with transparent pixels, which when shuffled to the top of the next column will remain blissfully invisible to your reader.

We have found that a simple css declaration of line-height:2em; did the trick for us. Depending on your choice of fonts and other typographical variable you may need to fiddle with this value to eliminate Safari’s display glitch, which will no doubt be corrected in a future release. Until then, slightly exaggerated vertical line spacing is a small price to pay for the convenience of multiple CSS3 columns.

 

Posted in OS X, Technology, Webmaster's Log | No Comments »

Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 3 — ClamAV

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

For users of Unix and Linux, the most comprehensive free anti-virus solution is the venerable ClamAV.

This open source project licensed under the GPL will thoroughly scrub your system of known threats to any platform. Its database of malware signatures is frequently updated and the system has a number of graphical front ends.

A new native port for Windows is still in the works, but there is already an older unsupported ClamAV for Windows and a ClamWin as well as a ClamXav 2.0 Public Beta that runs under the latest release of OS X for Mac Users.

While the various ClamAV GUI’s tend to produce too much low level feedback on what the tool is doing, the system gets the job done which is what really matters most in this space.

Also see Part 1 & Part 2 of this series.

Posted in Linux, OS X, Platforms, Security, Technology, Unix, Windows | 2 Comments »

Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 2 — iAntiVirus

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

If you are a home user and your platform of choice is the Mac, you can find a rather elegant and free OS X anti-virus solution in PC Tools iAntiVirus.

Note however that iAntiVirus won’t catch any non-mac threats, so if someone sends you a file with a windows virus you are still at risk of passing it on to friends. Nevertheless, it will catch known Mac viruses and trojans and since there are fewer of these on the Mac side, the scan will generally run at a good clip.

The company also has a subscription version of the tool with technical support for business users.

Alternatively, all Mac users can look at ClamXav (see tomorrow’s post).

Also see Part 1 & Part 3 of this series.

Posted in OS X, Platforms, Security, Technology | 1 Comment »