Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 29

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January 29

Weird text rendering

I read Cracked.com all the time. For the past year or more, that's been almost exclusively via their iPhone app, rather than the standard website, but the app doesn't have a search feature though, so today I went on via my computer. Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with the text rendering on that site? For the sake of it, here's a particular article I noticed it on, but it seems to be a design choice throughout the site. Rather than the text being black on white or dark grey on white, it almost looks like someone has tried to achieve blackness by typing with red print then overlaying it with blue print and so on until most of the text looks "dark" but sometimes at the edges you can see colours peeking through. What's up with that? I looked at the page source; it's the same kind of confused mess of Javascript that most pages are these days, but I didn't see anything that immediately struck me as weird. Is there a setting I should tweak on my browser? I'm using up-to-date Firefox on XP, if that makes a difference. Matt Deres (talk) 02:18, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I read Cracked.com every day, too. I'm using Firefox on Linux, Win7, my Android phones, and my Android tablet, and that page looks fine to me - black text on white background. Have you updated Java? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:21, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Yep, everything is up to date as far as I can tell. Matt Deres (talk) 00:21, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

It sounds to me that Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine) is fighting against your operating system's textual graphics rendering features (e.g. Microsoft ClearType). The red/blue print is probably a defective artifact due to broken text anti-aliasing. This is a common problem in Firefox: it's been reported against previous product versions frequently on Mozilla's forums. As a work-around, you can disable Firefox's hardware acceleration; or you can play with the operating system's ClearType settings; and see if you get a combination that works. Nimur (talk) 17:24, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I'll give that a shot; thanks. I haven't noticed it anywhere else and, now that I look at it closely, their headings and pic captions are just fine as well. Matt Deres (talk) 00:21, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Hmm. I've tried various combinations of having ClearType on or off and hardware acceleration on or off and it doesn't seem to make much difference at all. I'm willing to entertain any other suggestions. :) Matt Deres (talk) 00:30, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

I noticed while the pqge was loading that it accessed fonts.googleapis.com, which means that it is making use of Google Fonts. That might be where your problem lies, although really I'm just guessing. Looie496 (talk) 15:36, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

SOLVED: Sending email with attachments from AOL using Java

Hello,

I have been looking for hours now about how to use Java to send an email from an AOL account, in a way that allows attaching a file.

The options out there are few and far between. Usually the most common result is for sending mail via Gmail, and if it is written for AOL, it doesn't allow file attachments.

The best example i can find anywhere is here: C-Code-snippet-to-send-an-Email-with-attachment

... however, this is in C#, not Java.

Does anyone know some source code that can do this in Java? I prefer that it can be done without the need for external libraries, but ill take what i can get!

Thanks!

216.173.145.47 (talk) 20:52, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I finally found something that works! 216.173.145.47 (talk) 22:11, 29 January 2014 (UTC)