[thelist] Vista font sizes in CSS

[Adrian Simmons]

Robert Douglas wrote:
 > users *don't* have Candara installed, Verdana at
> 14px looks awful (IMHO). What to do?
Use verdana across the board for now?

I can only echo everyone else's comments that this problem (in various 
forms) has been with us since 1991. As a mac user I'm used to having to 
whack up the font sizes on most web sites I visit, because the mac versions 
of fonts are often smaller.

I'd be really interested to see how the new vista fonts compare size-wise to 
some of the modern mac fonts, we may be moving away from common fonts on all 
platforms, but are we getting close to at least getting similar sized fonts?

What to do? How about using conditional comments to send a reduced size font 
stylesheet to IE 6 and lower users - still leaves the problem of IE7 users 
on XP, anyone know if a conditional comment can be aimed at an OS specific 
version of IE?

Someone's already suggested browser sniffing (the horror, the horror!).

You could put a stylesheet switcher in page for users that want to increase 
text size but don't know how to use their web browser.

You could pop open a beer and chill out - it's the web, you're not going to 
get consistent type, so you may as well do your best, accept that some users 
will have small text and relax =D

> You'll also notice that bold is not very bold for Candara which is a bit
> disappointing.
Probably affected by font size and the OS level font smoothing though. You 
might want to play with different sizes as well as different fonts.

-- 
Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://perlucida.com>
e-mail <mailto:adrinux at perlucida.com>