Verdana and Georgia's families

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

I love Verdana and Georgia, because I can read them. I've read back
postings here on why the usual

font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

spec is less than ideal, because (as I understand it) e.g. "a" in 12pt
Verdana is actually a different real size than it is in 12-pt Arial.
That,
of course, is one reason I find Verdana especially legible and lovable.

So, if I want to spec Verdana & Georgia, what *do* I suggest as
alternates if not the usual suspects?

Mary Ellen
Doctor Science But Not Fonts, MA

[Lauri Raittila]

In article <Xn************ *************** **@193.229.0.31 >, Jukka K.
Korpela wrote:

Ian Rastall <id*******@eart hlink.net> wrote:

As long as a monospace <p> is set to 100%,
Why? Setting font-size: 100% is usually quite redundant.

And maybe even harmfull. Monospace is only case where bitmap fonts are
still in use. In Opera for example you can set monospace for certain
size, but when saying 100%, it will try use the size of parent element.
Usually this only results strange line-height, but also extreamily funny
text if difference is so big it decides to scale.

Courier is one of these bitmap fonts, I see you say that IE don't handle
it well.

or, say, an <h3> monospace set to
120%, what does it matter if it renders bigger on the screen than,
say, "times new roman"?
Remember that monospace fonts are very wide generally. And headings are
pretty big anyway. So you get wrapping heading pretty easily (same
applies to Verdana, which is also wide). And since they are so tall,
wrapping headings take lots of space. I think that in DTP they try to
avoid wrapping headings when they can.

The bigger problem is that the normal monospace fonts are ugly (IMHO).
And when someone¹ uses something that looks like Arial, but is only
available at 13px*6px, it certainly don't look good on headers, neither
in size intended, nor scaled bigger.
I really am asking, in case I'm missing something here. I use
Georgia on my two main sites

Georgia is good choise. Especially _whitout_ generic serif fallback.
As a rule, Web surfers don't complain to authors; they just go away if
they are not satisfied.

Yes. And there is good reasons behind this: most times complainments are
ignored, or answered something like "we don't support Opera (Mozilla,
IE5, ...)" or "No one has complained before, so we think it's OK"

Exeptions are usual, but the problem is, that in sites who respond to
complaints of user, aren't usually broken -> so people never learn that
complaining helps.

[1] me, for example, until I found out that somepeople use it for strange
things. Now I use this font and size with !important on every normally
monospace thing (unless I use Arial), and I think I set Courier New as
generic.

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
Saapi lähettää meiliä, jos aihe ei liity ryhmään, tai on yksityinen
tjsp., mutta älä lähetä samaa viestiä meilitse ja ryhmään.

[Stephen Poley]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003 20:35:50 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote:

Regarding Georgia, I'd suggest

font-family: Georgia, "Bookman Old Style", "Book Antiqua",
"New Century Schoolbook", "Times New Roman", serif;

but you might find some other combination better - judging similarity
of fonts is partly quite subjective.

I've recently started using Georgia as my default browser font. It
perhaps looks just a little old-fashioned, but has the advantage of
being just about the same width as Arial, which makes for a bit more
consistency in appearance among pages with serif and sans-serif fonts.
(Times New Roman, which I used to use, is one of the narrowest fonts.)

I've just noticed something odd though. Some while ago I put together
some font samples to compare widths, and sorted them in order of width.
I did this in Microsoft Works. I've now copied the list to Word and
discovered that the relative widths of the fonts are different! For
example, Garamond is wider than Times New Roman in Works, but in Word
it's the other way around.

So I put together an HTML page with the same fonts and found that in
Opera they are different again. For example MS Mincho is wider than
Bookman Old Style in Opera, but narrower in Works and Word. So I tried
IE, and found the rendition is almost the same as Works - except for the
Trebuchet font, which is a lot narrower.

This seems mighty odd.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the "identical in all browsers"
brigade, anyway.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sun, Jul 27, Ian Rastall inscribed on the eternal scroll:

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003 07:13:05 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"

You're missing the key point: font size is a technical concept, and
fonts of exactly the same size _look_ differently sized. And Verdana,
compared with almost anything else, is an extreme example of this.

I had often wondered this. But I guess that's what I'm saying. As long
as you're not setting font slightly smaller to accomodate Verdana,
than the user shouldn't be freaked out no matter which font she ends
up with.

But this is exactly the problem. Authors tell us that they select
Verdana precisely because they reckon it's more readable at smaller
font sizes; but the other side of the same coin is that it "looks too
large" at a given nominal font size. So, either they leave its size
unaltered (and complain that it looks too large), or they try to scale
it down (and risk unreadability on a browser which applies the
scaling-down but uses a different font).

But there's no solution to this in CSS, at least none that can be used
by authors in a WWW context. (If font-size-adjust had been defined
somewhat differently, and if that definition had actually been
implemented widely, then there might have been a chance.)

See earlier discussions, it's been turned over so many times before.

<h3>The <code>font-size</code> property</h3>

code {font-family: courier, monospace;}

I wouldn't bother setting that for headers, because I would never
write:

<h1><code>Thi s Is My Site</code></h1>

But see the example already given! There can be good reasons for
using such markups within headings.

cheers

--
"This is not rocket surgery" - Stan Brown

[Ian Rastall]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003 11:58:37 +0200, "Alan J. Flavell"
<fl*****@mail.c ern.ch> wrote:

Authors tell us that they select
Verdana precisely because they reckon it's more readable at smaller
font sizes; but the other side of the same coin is that it "looks too
large" at a given nominal font size. So, either they leave its size
unaltered (and complain that it looks too large), or they try to scale
it down (and risk unreadability on a browser which applies the
scaling-down but uses a different font).

I see what you're saying. Perhaps I don't notice these problems
because my screen is set to a rather low resolution. :-)

Ian
--
http://www.aspipes.org/
http://www.bookstacks.org/