2009/1/9 Cristian Palmas <[email protected]>: >> Dejan Kozina wrote: >> For all those in search of sensible values for font-family: >> http://www.sitepoint.com/article/eight-definitive-font-stacks/ >> >> djn > > Thanks for the link, Dejan. > It's a really interesting point of view to know about typography. > In my opinion, though, the author would have considered the font-size issue > too. In the font stack examples, there were many differences in font-size > and even in font-spacing. > > I think (but I didn't try yet) that in some cases may happen that on Linux, > for instance, one sees the fonts at 16px and on Win he/she sees > them much smaller. The author himself wrote that on Vista some of the > choices were smaller than the other similar fonts in the stacks. > Anyway that article is a good starting point to make our own experiments on > font-family choices. > The problem of playing with fonts is that we cannot force that aspect of design on the end user. Most modern browsers allow the user to override any style sheets or font choice with their own preferences. We could argue that that is the end users choice and they make the choice to disregard design decisions in this respect but at the moment I don't worry too much about providing long fonts stacks. I found I can spend a lot of time working with my current favourite fonts only to find the client doesn't necessarily have these fonts available and the visual effect achieved from specfic fonts is lost. More to the point, I found I spent time equalising a design between the commonly available fonts and those I really desired before realising that I was really working for personal preference and a small subset of people who might have all the fonts I have at my disposal on their machine.
The generic font-families in CSS 2 are serif, sans-serif, cursive, monospace and fantasy : http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#generic-font-families The author attempts to rename the cursive font family script and, in my view, doesn't properly indicate that decorative is not a generic font family at all. He uses the word decorative for the fantasy generic font family but enboldens his term for it, not the standard term. A lot of his references are quite old now - 2005? . There are more uptodate sources out there. What concerns me with font usage is the way in which each font displays differently - they kern differently, linespace differently and effectively take up screen estate differently. That conflicts with the design principle about using whitespace as part of design. The one thing this article has answered for me is the increased use of the Calibri font in Word documents. I use Open Office and the Calibri font on XP in OpenOffice Writer is a gothic typeface. I now assume the default font on Vista in M$ Office is a very different Calibri font. Now what would happen on my XP machine if/when a designer uses that font? I can already see the need to create a preferred local stylesheet. If you really want to explore fonts you might want to read http://files.jeffcroft.com/presentations/fowd_april_2007/JeffCroft_FOWD_Workshop_Elegant_Web_Typography.pdf - note that is more than 18 months old but still relevant - and look at sites like http://ilovetypography.com/ and http://www.webtypography.net/ for better sources of information. Regards L. ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
