Odd text-rendering problem in Collage Landscape

beardedgit

I've been troubleshooting this odd glitch in caption-text-rendering for weeks now and I can't find the cause. I've tried temporarily disabling various bits of custom CSS but can't pin down the problem.

Info as follows:

• It only happens in Collage Landscape galleries
• It only affects the first four visible or partly-visible images, as per the screenshots
• Scrolling down changes which images are affected, but they're always the first four in the window, That said, it doesn't show if the gallery is scrolled all the way to the end
• It shows using Firefox, it doesn't show in Chrome, I've not checked it in other browsers
• I'm using Firefox 26.0 on XP SP3, 1280x800 monitor

See it in action at http://beardedgit.smugmug.com/Fellwalking/Day-Walks/YHA-Keswick-Jan-2013

Custom CSS currently in use can be seen at http://beardedgit.smugmug.com/CustomCSS

Screenshots:





Any help sussing this problem would be much appreciated, thanks for looking :thumb

thenickdude

Does it happen every time? Does it still do it if you're not logged in?

I cannot reproduce this on Firefox 26 on Windows XP SP3 inside a VirtualBox VM (which means no 3D graphics acceleration is available). It's likely a quality difference caused by the way Firefox ends up accelerating the rendering or composition of that text, so probably doesn't appear if hardware acceleration isn't available.

Have you tried updating your graphics card drivers?

beardedgit

Lamah wrote: »

Does it happen every time? Does it still do it if you're not logged in?

I cannot reproduce this on Firefox 26 on Windows XP SP3 inside a VirtualBox VM (which means no 3D graphics acceleration is available). It's likely a quality difference caused by the way Firefox ends up accelerating the rendering or composition of that text, so probably doesn't appear if hardware acceleration isn't available.

Have you tried updating your graphics card drivers?

Happens every time, logged in and logged out.
Graphics drivers up-to-date.
Cheers for looking, Nicholas

ChancyRat

What is the problem, exactly? That on some photos, the caption wraps?
They all look good to me.

beardedgit

ChancyRat wrote: »

What is the problem, exactly? That on some photos, the caption wraps?
They all look good to me.

No, not the wraps, the quality/definition of the text characters.

Here's a better-quality screenshot of it from a different gallery, bad on the left, good on the right. These are the 4th and 5th images in a top row:

Andy

Just went thru this gallery
http://beardedgit.smugmug.com/Astronomy/My-Astropics/Lunar-pics

all renderings fine here, FF (latest) on Mac (latest).

ChancyRat

They all look perfect to me.

beardedgit

Perhaps I'm not explaining it properly, I'll have another go at explaining how to reproduce it.

• Open the gallery that I linked to, or the one that Andy linked to
• Scroll down and find a position where there is a row of pics that are only partly visible so that only their bottom halves are showing
• Hover over the pics in that row and see the text that appears - for me the text over the first four images is bad and the text over any others in the window is good.

ChancyRat

They all look good to me. Did you try different browsers?
Or, what Lamah said, "Have you tried updating your graphics card drivers?"

thenickdude

beardedgit wrote: »

Perhaps I'm not explaining it properly, I'll have another go at explaining how to reproduce it.

I tried the "make the top row half visible" thing and it still didn't reproduce for me.

Do you have any Firefox add-ons installed? It'd be really odd for them to cause this, but try disabling all of them and try again.

beardedgit

Lamah wrote: »

Do you have any Firefox add-ons installed? It'd be really odd for them to cause this, but try disabling all of them and try again.

Took your advice, disabled the lot, restarted, made no difference.

Tried to reproduce same glitch on a different computer, same versions of XP, Firefox and Chrome, glitch didn't happen in either browser, so it must be something on my laptop.

One thing I noticed on closer inspection on my laptop - on hover, the affected text does render as good for a split second (less time than it takes to display the tooltip), but then "goes bad". It's almost as if it displays good initially but then something overrides it immediately afterwards. I did a dire-quality movie-grab which just about captures it, it's at http://beardedgit.smugmug.com/Everything-else/General/Miscellaneous-2/i-Z2vk9zt/A

Jtring

beardedgit wrote: »

... One thing I noticed on closer inspection on my laptop - on hover, the affected text does render as good for a split second (less time than it takes to display the tooltip), but then "goes bad". It's almost as if it displays good initially but then something then overrides it immediately afterwards.

I've not seen that on Smugmug, and I don't see it on your site, but I have seen something similar on my computer at other websites that use small white text on a dark background. The good-then-bad shift occurs only in Firefox. I can get rid of it by telling Firefox not to use hardware acceleration: Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing and then un-check "Use hardware acceleration when available". Might give that a try.

Ref: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/946575

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

beardedgit

Jtring wrote: »

I can get rid of it by telling Firefox not to use hardware acceleration: Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing and then un-check "Use hardware acceleration when available". Might give that a try.

ivarivar That fixed it! ivarivar

My thanks go to you all