A strange thing happened to me every time I composed a piece of text on my OS X 10.5.7-powered Mail.app.
(My text setting is Lucida Grande at 12pt. size)
On random occasions, the rendered text would look the exact same way, yet somehow kerned loosely. It’s as if the line of text loses its spacing information entirely. See it?
Note how the text “I just saw” on the second line and the one on the fourth is spaced differently. Let’s juxtapose the two directly below each other to make it clearer.
I noted that the kerning between the letters j–u, s–t and s–a shifted to the right by 1 pixel, yet these minor changes are enough to make the spacing between the word “just” and “saw” appear larger, thus distracting the eye from the normal pace of reading.
If you’re an OS X 10.5.7 and Mail.app user, try reproducing this problem by writing several lines of new mail on Mail.app. See how, from time to time, the spacing of the letters would shift.
Have anyone else had this problem?
PS. Despite the pixel shift, the anti-aliasing method used to draw these letters remains unchanged. Note how the ‘fringes’ around the alphabets are actually of the same color—except for the leftmost stroke of the letter ‘u’ which lightened considerably.