On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 6:29 PM, davor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Matthew Nuzum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> How do you tell if the font is too tall and what is the impact of
>> choosing such a font? Does it cause the line-height to increase to
>> accommodate the font or does it just fill in the whitespace and cause
>> the text to look jumbled?
>
> In short, Verdana (and Helvetica) have greater x-height then Arial.
> Also Verdana is very "wide" typeface. If you take a body of text in
> Verdana and Arial you'll notice that Arial (or Helvetica) text usually
> has greater count of words per line and it's somewhat easier to follow
> text line with your eyes (you could perhaps say that text has better
> legibility). Same legibility using Verdana can be achieved by giving
> her more line height.

Hi, thanks for your reply but I didn't get the info I was hoping for.
Here are some more details: I manage a website for an organization who
supports free software and I'm investigating giving a preference to
free fonts over non-free fonts (free as in speech - so covered under
an open source license).

In my comparison the x-height was not something I'd worried about
because I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that the height of the font
dictated the line-height.

So using a contrived example, FontXYZ tends to be very readable on low
ppi devices (< 100 ppi) because of its emphasis on vertical and
horizontal strokes with no serifs. Therefore I might choose it based
solely on that fact and not look at the bigger picture of line-height
and gray space.

This is why I was curious and asked how to tell if a font was too tall
and what the impact of choosing such a font is. Presumably it's
reduced white space but would love to know if my assumption is wrong.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode

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