On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:48 AM, Richard Mason wrote: > > Reference [1] says "The example given clearly shows that the browser > "knows" the x-height of "Times New Roman" to do the calculation.". > That's wrong. Browsers do not know the x-height of a font because the > Operating System doesn't know. > > http://www.emdpi.com/css3font.html
Hello Richard, Your article is interesting, but I do not fully agree on your conclusion that "browsers do not know the x-height". The x-height is used as 'ex' measurement unit and at least in Gecko this is pretty accurate. I don't know exactly how Gecko determines it (reading metrics info from the font file, rendering glyphs, ...) but it knows it. If you ask Gecko a box with width 1ex, it gets it correctly, and of course the result depends on the font and the size. Indeed I've a page that can exactly reproduce the tables in your article [1], when seen with Gecko: the page shows (using javascript) the width in px of a box having width:1ex (at various font sizes). About the 'aspect ratio' oscillations depending on font size, this is in part unavoidable due to the necessity to round to an integer number of pixels. I've sometimes seen more oscillations than expected at small font sizes, but of course they damp down at increasing sizes. Bruno [1] http://brunildo.org/test/normal-lh-plot.html -- Bruno Fassino http://www.brunildo.org/test ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
