It may actually be easier to handle the font fallbacks than you think,
but it depends on the chandler selections. for example, I believe tahoma
is not supported on mac and is probably the best loking copy font on
windows. I would degrade fonts as
tahoma, lucida grande, arial (to use a mac example) this should give the
desired result. Its really not that painful to get it to work right. I
can show you an example if you like. Sometimes its better to show.
The issue with font rendering is precisely that different typefaces
render differently on different platforms. To add to this , each OS
manufacturer commissioned specific fonts (lucida grande, tahoma,
verdana, and trebuchet) optimized for the combination of antialiasing
and display resolution on their systems. Ironically windows generally
renders better than macOS provided cleartype is enabled. If not, you're
best off with tahoma (created originally by matthew carter for windows
ce handhelds, if I remember correctly) on windows as the kerning pairs
are designed for 96 and 120ppi. On mac I would stay with lucida grande
if you can, as the mac antialiasting scheme doesn't render small font
sizes very well.
Incidentally, Arial was a knockoff of Helvetica to avoid paying license
fees. Its actually designed for print, not for on-screen display. There
is one advantage to arial, but only to a certain flavor of it--
complete support of the entire unicode charater set (the unicode safe
arial is something like 20mb).
Jeremy
Matthew Eernisse wrote:
I have an item on the feature-ranking matrix for Scooby 0.3 (Cosmo 0.5
now I guess) that refers to fonts. There are visual guidelines posted
here for Chandler:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/VisualGuidelines
This document specifies different fonts based on OS, which is a bit
problematic for Scooby (i.e., Cosmo's Web UI) since what we have right
now is pretty much just CSS (with a bit of variable interpolation, but
that's essentially it).
I'm kind of reluctant to start cooking up OS-sniffing code to serve
out specific stylesheets. That seems to me like a bad idea given how
brittle that kind of stuff tends to be.
Hoping CSS font-fallback will save us is not really a viable option
either, given that the same font may exist on multiple platforms, but
look horrible on some:
http://www.badboy.ro/articles/2005-12-29/index.php
Is there any reason we can't just pick a universal Web-font like
Verdana for the Web UI that we know will pretty much look good
everywhere?
Any thoughts?
Matthew
p.s In any case I assume that eventually people will be able to save
their desired font (or skin, whatever) in their personal preferences.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
