On 2011/03/05 21:30 (GMT+0900) Philippe Wittenbergh composed:
Felix Miata wrote:
http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Font/fonts-weightier.html should show at least some readers that weights lighter than 400 do exist in at least a couple of commonly available families, one of which is free and available to all, and installed by default on most Linux systems. I was dumbfounded to discover Helvetica Neue actually has two weights lighter than 400
The fact that Helvetica Neue has some weights lighter than 400 (100 - extra light and 300 -light), has been mentioned a couple of times on this list.
I remembered no mention about more than one, but chose it to test there specifically because I remembered it was not limited to two.
In addition to 400 and 700 it has also a 500 (medium) weight on OS X 10.6. And OS X 10.6.4+ ships with Helvetica font-weight 300 face.
You mean 300 is not the same as 200? Here on Tiger 200 & 300 are the same, lighter than 400, heavier than 100. So 10.6.4+ has 7 Helvetica Neue weights in all?
Fwiw. OS X has a few more fonts with multiple font-weights.
Not a surprise, but that page was sticking to families one commonly finds in CSS in the wild. FWIW, which are they? OS X newer than Tiger is not available for my G4.
Your test case has bad fall back. I don't have DejaVu (*) installed
What makes it "bad"? Did note 1 escape your understanding?
anymore on OS X, and what I see is my default monospace font, not my default sans-serif font (Helvetica Neue). Removing all instances of monospace in your test file makes it fall back correctly.
Considering note 1, what would be the "correct" result?
am at a loss to fathom how lighter than normal/400 is technically possible at the minescule 12px size so commonly used by web pages
Both the lighter faces display perfectly fine on my systems, even at 10 ~ 12px. Whether I can read text comfortably at that size is another matter, unrelated to the font-weight.
I remain unable to fathom how weights lighter than 400 @12px size are possible, since it seems fairly clear the stem weights at that spec are 1px. I suppose the lightness must be due to expensive crafting to reduce pixel density of lighter weight fonts, creating the illusion of less weight by bleeding in background color, but how is the overall narrowing accomplished? 12px is too small for me to see any detail. Is letter spacing subpixel at small sizes?
(*) iirc, DejaVu ships with a font-weight 100 face in addition to 400 and 700 weights. That extra-light face is bad btw (validation errors), and should not be installed on OS X.
Again I'm puzzled. How does one validate a font face? http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/files/dejavu/2.33/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.33.zip has 21 separate files, four of each type, except for the odd ExtraLight with only one. Are you saying Linux is wrong to supply ExtraLight when 100 weight book is called?
-- "How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver." Proverbs 16:16 NKJV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] 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/
