[Qt-interest] Qt WebKit font rendering compared to Safari

[Rush Manbert]

I have a custom browser that I wrote a few years ago using the Apple WebKit. It basically runs client-side applications where the GUI us presented in the browser control. Most of the code is not browser-specific, and I designed it so that I could write an adapter layer that would let me use different browser controls.

The Mac version was great. I then tried to port it to Windows. I could get it running about 90%, but there was always something that wouldn't work when using the IE browser control.

We want to be able to use this application cross-platform, so we investigated whether we could adapt it to Qt Webkit. The initial result was favorable, so we bought a couple of commercial licenses for Qt.

I have spent the last few days writing the full adapter for Qt WebKit. I've got it running on the Mac and I can run most of the same applications that I can run in my Apple WebKit version. This lets me run them side by side and that reveals a problem. The exact same web pages displayed on the two browsers look different. The worst thing is that the text on the Qt WebKit version looks very bad compared to the Apple version. The spacing is strange. The characters just don't look nice and clear like they do in the Apple version. I can run in different languages, and the Kanji version looks terrible in the Qt WebKit browser.

Does anyone else recognize this issue, and are there any settings I should make in the code to try and improve things? QWebSettings has attributes for font size setting, but I can't find a description of how they should be used. Any hints or pointers or outright help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rush