16.8.2011 3:58, Keith Purtell wrote:
I was under the impression that reasonable kerning was built into most typefaces.
Well, most good typefaces at least. But web browsers haven't traditionally applied kerning.
Firefox now applies some kerning in some situations. By default, it does so for a few fonts in some sizes, relatively rarely (the documentation hasn't been very clear on this), and the behavior can be affected using the nonstandard CSS property text-rendering (which also affects ligature behavior). But your page does not use that property, and according to available documentation, kerning is not applied to the Arial font (which is what my Firefox used when I tested, since my system lacks the two fonts you list before Arial). And as I wrote, even setting text-rendering so that kerning be not applied does not change the behavior.
When I test the text "CONTACT" in Word, playing with different font faces and weights, with kerning on and off, I gathered that what we're seeing on Firefox is normal kerning for Arial (and relatives?) in small size in bold. Its kerning rules are just somewhat unsuitable in such special cases. The effect looks so strong because the _other_ letter combinations in the word are not (noticeably) kerned.
This might be a feature, in some systems for some combinations of font face, font size, font weight, and possibly phase of the moon, where the low-level rendering routines, hiding well below the level down to which CSS has any power, apply kerning.
The obvious way to avoid the problem is use normal mixed case instead of uppercase. For some reason, authors often use all uppercase for menu items, buttons, and some other elements, even though most fonts have been primarily designed for normal mixed-case text.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
