On Sep 21, 2009, at 11:33 PM, Rob Emenecker wrote: >> [1] font: 1em/1.4 'Helvetica Neue', 'Nimbus Sans L', Arial, >> sans-serif; 'Helvetica Neue' is a better screen font than >> 'Helvetica, and matches much closer the intrinsic line-height >> of Arial. Plus it has multiple weights (100, 300, 400, 700 or >> UltraLight, Light, Normal/regular and >> bold) which is a nice thing to use, sometimes > > I agree that Helvetica Neue is a beautiful font, especially when > compared to > Arial (ugh), or the default cuts of Helvetica. Though designing to > it (and > Nimbus Sans L) for web, means designing for a narrow market.
How is that designing for a narrow market ? That font stack covers fonts installed by default on all major platforms (for Linux I test mainly with Ubuntu, as it appears the most widely distributed distro). It uses fonts with very similar metrics (aspect ratio, glyph width) - and a similar look & feel. People will see the page with a font that comes with their system. The order in which the fonts are specified is relatively important. The browser will first check for 'Helvetica Neue', if not available, it will check for 'Nimbus Sans L', and then fall back to 'Arial'. This is to make sure OS X users will see 'Helvetica Neue' instead of Arial. > It also assumes > that the people that HAVE the font, actually have it ACTIVE. That applies to _any_ and all font-stacks you can imagine. The only font-stack that is relatively foolproof is just specifying 'font- family: sans-serif'. And as Lesley mentions, people can override your font-stack/font-size simply by checking a pref in their (few do, and if experience wit providing support for a browser demonstrates anything, half the people who do so do it by accident). As I have mentioned in an other thread, don't expect to find 'Verdana' installed on any of my 5 Macs. 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/
