Bold takes up more space?

[Victor Martin]

Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than non-bold text.
Is there a way to keep the space bold takes up within the limits of the
regular text while keeping the same font?

[Els]

Victor Martin wrote:

Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than
non-bold text. Is there a way to keep the space bold takes
up within the limits of the regular text while keeping the
same font?

For height: yes, fiddle with the line-height.
For width, I don't know.

--
Els
http://locusmeus.com/
Sonhos vem. Sonhos vão. O resto é imperfeito.
- Renato Russo -

[Spartanicus]

Victor Martin <no***@NoWhereOnThe.net> wrote:

Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than non-bold text.
Is there a way to keep the space bold takes up within the limits of the
regular text while keeping the same font?

No.

--
Spartanicus

[Jan Roland Eriksson]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 12:06:46 +0100, Spartanicus <[e-mail]>
wrote:

Victor Martin <no***@NoWhereOnThe.net> wrote:

Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than non-bold text.
Is there a way to keep the space bold takes up within the limits of the
regular text while keeping the same font?

No.

Yes (at least in theory).

<http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#letter-spacing>

--
Rex

[Stan Brown]

"Victor Martin" <no***@NoWhereOnThe.net> wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than non-bold text.
Is there a way to keep the space bold takes up within the limits of the
regular text while keeping the same font?

It's bold because the strokes are thicker. The strokes are thicker
and therefore more white space is needed or the letters would seem
distorted.

I think your question is "how can I make text bigger without making
it take more space?"

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Stan Brown wrote:

I think your question is "how can I make text bigger without making
it take more space?"

Surely the solution is to make the normal font spacing wider, so that
the bold font also fits into the available space?

[Jan Roland Eriksson]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 14:12:10 +0100, "Alan J. Flavell"
<fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Stan Brown wrote:

I think your question is "how can I make text bigger without making
it take more space?"

Surely the solution is to make the normal font spacing wider, so that
the bold font also fits into the available space?

Exactly; the solution is in CSS1 already, fairly well supported too.

--
Rex

[Victor Martin]

>>Bold text in proportional fonts use up more space than non-bold text.

Is there a way to keep the space bold takes up within the limits of the
regular text while keeping the same font?

It's bold because the strokes are thicker. The strokes are thicker
and therefore more white space is needed or the letters would seem
distorted.

I think your question is "how can I make text bigger without making
it take more space?"

Only if by bigger you mean thicker, but I don't mind making the
bold fonts just a bit smaller (it may be necessary on pain of too
much distortion) as long as they are well differentiated from
the regular font and they don't tax the space they take up any
more than the regular font, so I thought playing with

<b><font size=-1.25pt>This is bold.</font></b>

might do it, but many fonts can't be scaled by such
fractional point increments. letter-spacing/line-height is a
way around it too, but I think finding a good scalable font
with a close 1:1 bold/regular text footprint ratio would also
be fruitful.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Victor Martin <no***@NoWhereOnThe.net> wrote:

I thought playing with

<b><font size=-1.25pt>This is bold.</font></b>
might do it,
Why? There's nothing in HTML specifications that suggests that this would
have any defined meaning.

This would have a defined meaning:
<b style="font-size:95%">This is bold</b>
(Naturally you'd want to use an external style sheet, not CSS embedded
into a style="..." attribute; this is just a quick example.)

Even in CSS, you cannot say "1.25pt smaller [than something]". Setting
font-size to 95% or similar percentage may or may not have a visible
effect. This depends on the availability of the current font in different
sizes in each user's system.
but many fonts can't be scaled by such
fractional point increments. letter-spacing/line-height is a
way around it too, but I think finding a good scalable font
with a close 1:1 bold/regular text footprint ratio would also
be fruitful.

I think we need a URL that illustrates the problem. _Why_ is it a problem
that bold text can take somewhat more space? I would look at the
direction of removing the design decisions that make such minor variation
a problem.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Greg Schmidt]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 14:47:45 +0000 (UTC), Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

I think we need a URL that illustrates the problem. _Why_ is it a problem
that bold text can take somewhat more space? I would look at the
direction of removing the design decisions that make such minor variation
a problem.

I saw a site once that changed links from normal text to bold when you
hovered over them. It was a fixed-width design. One of the links happened
to be at the right end of a line of text, close enough that changing to
bold made it move to the beginning of the next line instead. So, hovering
over it made it move away from the mouse, and then moving the mouse towards
the new location "unhovered" it and it would move back. The effect was
that it was impossible to ever click the link.

--
Greg Schmidt gr***@trawna.com
Trawna Publications http://www.trawna.com/

[Tim]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

I think we need a URL that illustrates the problem. _Why_ is it a problem
that bold text can take somewhat more space? I would look at the
direction of removing the design decisions that make such minor variation
a problem.

Greg Schmidt <gr***@trawna.com> posted:
I saw a site once that changed links from normal text to bold when you
hovered over them. It was a fixed-width design. One of the links happened
to be at the right end of a line of text, close enough that changing to
bold made it move to the beginning of the next line instead. So, hovering
over it made it move away from the mouse, and then moving the mouse towards
the new location "unhovered" it and it would move back. The effect was
that it was impossible to ever click the link.

Well, the answer to that is to not do the daft bold hovering thing in the
first place, rather than do yet another silly thing on top of it.

You really couldn't rely on a font sizing trick counteracting a boldening
effect in a reliable manner, either. This isn't typesetting, where there's
actually a standard bolding effect (specified amount of boldness, if you
could call it that), and you know the fonts that you have at your disposal.
CSS may allow you to specify a numerical figure for the font weight, but I
don't see any specified relationship with its size.

--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please delete some files yourself.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Tim <ti*@mail.localhost.invalid> wrote:

This isn't typesetting, where there's
actually a standard bolding effect (specified amount of boldness, if
you could call it that), and you know the fonts that you have at your
disposal. CSS may allow you to specify a numerical figure for the
font weight, but I don't see any specified relationship with its
size.

The values of font-weight in CSS, from 100 to 900, or keywords that are
mapped to such numeric values, correspond to an established scale in
typography. But as you remark, the scale has no specified effect on any
dimension, and the effect in practice varies by font family and size.
Thus, despite the use of numbers, it's really just an ordinal scale (in
the weak sense that smaller numeric value implies smaller or equal
boldness).

In HTML, there is only one kind of boldness that you specify, using <b>
markup, and it is natural to expect that it maps to font-weight: bold,
which means font-weight: 700. Or is it? Another interpretation would be
to map it to font-weight: bolder, and this would mean that
<b><b>...</b></b> could be (depending on font) bolder than bold, i.e.
bolder than <b>...</b>.

Whatever method you use to bold text in HTML or CSS, it means selecting
(when possible) a bold font as designed by the font designer. It's up to
the designer to decide what boldness means, and it may well mean
different things to different characters.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html