On Sep 21, 2009, at 11:48 AM, Felix Miata wrote: > Windows special cases CSS requests for Helvetica. All instances of > helvetica > in CSS are treated by the OS as if had been written arial instead. > Furthermore, Arial is the OS-wide browser default sans-serif font, > and what > both IE and Safari will use (even on Mac) if any combination of only > Helvetica, Arial and/or sans-serif are the only items in a font- > family rule > stack. Apparently Safari & IE only use the pref setting in the > absence of any > CSS. In contrast, sans-serif to a Gecko means use the pref anytime > sans-serif > is requested by a rule stack, in addition to when there is no font- > family > CSS.
That is _not_ correct as far as Safari Mac is concerned (I don't have Helvetica installed on my Windoze VMs). 1. Safari on OS X has 'Helvetica' as default sans-serif font (for Western languages). 2. When 'Helvetica' is requested, 'Helvetica' is used. 3. The thing Safari does, again on OS X, is matching the font-metrics of Helvetica to the ones of Arial (and idem ditto for Times/Times New Roman, Courier/Courier New) - for some webcompat reasons. For example, Arial has a slightly bigger 'normal' line-height than Helvetica, but Safari uses the line-height from Arial. testcase: http://dev.l-c-n.com/_temp/helvetica-f.html screenshot: http://dev.l-c-n.com/_b/helvetica-f.png on the left a recent Gecko nightly build, on the right, Safari 4.03 Arial is a clone of Helvetica and both fonts are very similar, but look closely at the '@', they are different. Philippe --- Philippe Wittenbergh http://l-c-n.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
