On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Mike M wrote:
Attempting to do css for cross platform/browser compatibility. Have an issue
with IE6 sp1 running on NT4.
NT4 starts with a relatively impoverished set of fonts.
When using IE6 sp1, example 1 works fine, example 2 produces unreadable
text. Rectangular blocks and symbols. Is this unreadable serif font deal a
known bug? Any suggestions appreciated.
Suggestions for you or for your readers?
For you - if your font selections are causing problems for your
readers, then stop doing it:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...onts.html#dont
For your readers - install optional language support, install better
fonts, make better default font selections, if necessary visit IE's
Accessibility menu and tell it to ignore fonts specified in the web
page.
On at least one Win OS (not sure if it was NT4 or NT5 ;-) I found that
installing Japanese language support (which I didn't actually need)
resulted in a wonderful expansion of the number of symbols which IE
would display correctly. Mozilla (Netscape >=6) had no problems
before or after... Opera was also OK.
example 1
body { font-family: sans-serif; }
example 2
body { font-family: serif; }
If you're going to specify font-family at all for IE, then you
probably should specify some of the better MS-supplied fonts first
(Arial, Lucida Sans Unicode, Palatino Linotype, Tahoma, etc. as the
case may be, but NOT Verdana (for reasons stated here often enough).
MS's choice of generic serif or sans font can often be distinctly
sub-optimal. However, fundamentally I stand by my original advice,
based on experience:
if you are trying to use a wide character repertoire in a WWW
context, then if you, as author, try to force a particular font to be
used by every reader, whether by CSS or by FONT FACE, you will likely
do more harm than good
By all means specify your choice of font for decorative headings and
other annotations where the character repertoire is not an issue, but
leave it off at least for the parts of the body content where you need
your wide repertoire. IMHO.
good luck.