I compiled from the CVS on a sparc solaris box today (Wed Apr 14) and I was looking at this URL http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/benchmarking-1.html when I noticed that the way an apostrophe is displayed looks really strange. Look at the end of this first paragraph in this webpage and you will see that lots of space is wasted after an apostrophe. The other odd thing is that it almost looks like a " or something.

Another thing you might notice on this page is that links looks really strange because the underline of the link goes through the link. Check out the "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach." link to see what I mean.

This is a font problem on solaris. Syd, please take a look.

Underlines seem o.k. in the recent build. If an apostrophe is included in the HTML literally, it displays fine. If ’ is used, then the apostrophe glyph is rendered differently, and there is/are space(s). Same thing happens on Windows platform, but it is not as pronounced as on Linux/Solaris.

I just checked this page under Linux with the most recent version of viewer. The isn't in "platform isn't likely" looks just fine under netscape 4 but under viewer the ' does not even show up in the browser. That is even worse then the solaris problem. The underline problem does not seem to show up in my current Linux build.

This is per spec, I think, and it looks the same under IE.

I do not understand why this is "per spec". The mozilla build does not look anything like Navigator 4.x. I have no idea if it is the same as IE as I do not run windows, but I do not see how that makes any difference. The rendering is really ugly and I do not think this is what people would expect for a '.