[thelist] Breaking away from "Standard" Fonts
Felix Miata
mrmazda at ij.net
Mon Mar 13 20:11:05 CST 2006
On 06/03/09 14:54 Rob Smith apparently typed:
> We all know about the 7 or so standard fonts guaranteed to work in any
> browser.
> C) What problems have you encountered?
Actually the normal (common) fonts are as likely as not to be a problem
of one sort or another. Authors seem to little short of universally set
'Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif' or 'Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif' or
variations thereof that include Verdana and/or Geneva. Helvetica is a
bitmap font on Linux and so is really best avoided entirely, and the
relative giant Verdana has its own problems as a result of its large
size. http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/Font/font-helvetica.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html
By choosing some combination of those 4 common fonts and/or Times*
and/or Georgia you guarantee huge numbers of users won't see their
favorite, and by so doing you also guarantee huge numbers won't see the
physical size of their choice either (regardless if your CSS is
user-default based on nominal size or not). Compare them yourself:
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-face-commons.html
So, usually I set body copy simply to sans-serif, and limit use of
common and uncommon families to font samples, menus, headings and other
peripherals, and recommend others do likewise, or less.
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/userdefaultbased.html
--
"Blessed are they whose ways are blameless, who walk according
to the law of the Lord." Psalm 119:11 NIV
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/auth
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