On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Felix Miata wrote:

> Note the M$ Vista monospace font Consolas is smaller than traditional
> monospace fonts, similar in apparent size to TNR. In fact, all the Vista
> fonts are closer together in apparent size than the traditional M$ web fonts.

Although that's good for word processor users, it's a problem to web 
authors. As I mentioned (somewhat indirectly), there's actually a good 
reason for the (little known) default font size reduction for elements 
like pre and code on IE: without the reduction, the default monospace font 
would look too big as compated with the default copy text font.

Due to such effects, authors who set font size need to use something like

pre, code, samp, kbd, tt { font-size: 90%; }

if they want a typical monospace font look compatible in size with a 
typical sans-serif font, not to mention typical serif fonts.

Now if we decide to use Vista fonts as the primarily suggested fonts on 
our web pages (and I expect authors often will, as they learn about these 
fonts), then we are in trouble. If we use Consolas as the monospace font 
and have a reduction rule like the above, it becomes too small. Without 
the reduction rule, monospace fonts will look big on systems that lack the 
Vista fonts. The font-size-adjust property was designed to fix such 
problems, but it only works on Mozilla browsers.

I have no good solution to this, but I thought the problem should be 
mentioned, since it is relevant to people who use monospace fonts
(typically for displaying computer code). Maybe they should ignore Vista 
fonts in designing their CSS style, for now. On the other hand, the effect 
is not _too_ bad - at least if the factor is kept at about 90% and not 
e.g. 83.3%.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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