Hi Nick Firstly I'd just like to reassure you that I hate the requirement of pixel perfection and understand it is not possible, We should be educating our clients and designers that embracing the web for its fluidity is what we should be aiming for, and not railing against it. I am an advocate of allowing the web to be fluid and I am fully aware that sites will not look the same cross-browser/cross-platform. Unfortunately clients and designers don't always feel the same. My job is to make websites look as close as possible to each other across the board. However I do not create the designs and I do not actually speak to clients, I create sites from designs given to me. Then the client will compare the design they've seen mocked up in Photoshop with the online version, and something that I get back as a bug, time and time again is that the font-sizes don't match. (we're talking out by 1 or 2 pixels here, not massive differences)
They're testing their font-sizes by taking a screen shot and then using a tool such as photoshop to measure and compare the pixel value. As I've used Owens method for a long time now, and for me it gives the best result cross the board for font-sizes. I'd like very much to continue using it, but as you can imagine, if I keep getting bugs from clients re; font-sizes, I'm going to be pushed to fix them. If I can use a tool to measure a font, and say to my boss that look this is the font-size on the website, and then compare that to the original design, I will have something to back up the reasons why I've used Owens method. On 11/09/2007, Nick Fitzsimons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do you know of a font-size checker. I don't fully trust > firebug's layout > measurement when it comes to font-sizes, as I think it gives > a value for the > entire area that the font covers rather than the equivalent value in > pixels. Or am I wrong and I should trust firebug? Not sure what you mean, If you open firebug and select a piece of text to then look at the layout optioni the values it gives are the measurements of the surrounding element area and not the actual font-size. So if you select a P it measures the area of the P, the same with any element. It will also measure the full height from the top of the tallest letter to the bottom of a letter such as a g/y/p etc. Which I guess leads me onto another question, where is the height measured from typographically to give the pixel value in something such as Photoshop. >>but the first thing to remember is that in CSS, >>"pixel" doesn't mean "single dot on the screen" as it does in something like >>Photoshop: >><http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#x39> Point taken, and I am fully aware of this, however we need to educate the clients, and reassure them about why we have made the decisions that we've made. > saying the fonts vary from the original design >>What do you mean precisely by "the original design"? Do you mean comps >>produced in Photoshop, Illustrator or some such application? I get designs in PSD format, the client will have seen printouts of the PSDs and probably been emailed JPGs of the design. >>If so you should be aware that these applications tend to render >>anti-aliased fonts by default, but web browsers on the Windows platform >>rendering to a non-LCD display (or with an LCD where Microsoft's ClearType >>technology is not enabled) perform no anti-aliasing. As a result, clients >>will be shown a lovely anti-aliased design comp, but when they view the >>actual page on their 3 year old computer with a 7 year old monitor, it will >>have nasty jagged fonts. It's best to avoid building up their expectations >>when presenting designs for web pages to them. I beg to differ as Safari on windows renders fonts smoothly, and they look stunning. Fonts on a Mac just look amazing too. It just highlights how shoddy fonts are in other applications on windows and makes them look ugly. I also feel that in todays market of ridiculously cheap electronic equipment, we cannot assume that our clients will be using such old machines as you suggest. Of course we need to create websites that will degrade gracefully. >>At a design studio I worked at a few years ago I asked the designers to >>disable font smoothing in PhotoShop when mocking up web pages. They >>complained that it made their designs "look ugly", but when I pointed out >>that they were just seeing what the end users would see, they realised that >>it was better to work to the limitations of the destination technology, >>rather than show the client beautifully smooth designs which were not, in >>reality, achieveable in a web browser on Windows. Thats a very good idea, I will suggest it, I think it'll go down like a lead balloon with our design team. Thanks Kristina ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
