Subject:
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Re: Different fonts in webpages
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Mon, 11 Oct 1999 05:53:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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409 times
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In lugnet.publish, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> Agreed. I never specify font, only size and face. However I HAVE seen
> people (including here at Lugnet(tm) I think but I could be too wrong
> and too lazy to check, I am in a hotel and paying for my 800# access)
> name off a bazillion font types (helvetica, geneva, ariel yada yada) to
> get one sans serif font and ditto for Times New Roman or its workalikes.
Changing fonts is playing with fire. It's possible to do it right, but it's
tricky. Some of my rules of thumb:
1. The best way to specify a Helvetica-like face is to use
<FONT FACE="Geneva,Arial,Helvetica">
in that order. Geneva is the for the Mac, which doesn't have Arial, and
Mac users claim that Geneva looks better to them at small sizes than either
Helvetica or Arial. Arial is only there for Winblows systems. Helvetica is
for non-Winblows and non-Mac systems. That pretty much covers all the
platforms.
2. If you want Verdana, it's OK to leave out Geneva and Arial because both
Macs and Winblows are shipping with Verdana these days. Put in Helvetica as
a back-up in case Verdana isn't found,
<FONT FACE="Verdana,Helvetica">
and optionally include Geneva if you think someone might be viewing your page
on an old Mac without Verdana and you care what it looks like.
3. If you change out of the default serif font -- say, via
<FONT FACE="Georgia"> or <FONT FACE="Verdana">
beware that <PRE> and <TT> don't work anymore inside of that <FONT> tag on
some Winblows systems: the text doesn't come out in the default monospace
font (i.e. Courier) but instead comes out in the enlclosed <FONT> face! %^(
This is broken in both Nutscrape Navigator 4.5 and Internet Exploiter 3.0,
maybe other versions as well. It's a little bit worse in NN than in MSIE,
but it only works correctly in MSIE if you use a virtual font name like
"Times" or "Helvetica" rather than an actual font name like "Times New Roman"
or "Arial".
4. Georgia is a really nice alternative to Times New Roman, but, unlike
Times, it looks terrible next to Courier -- the sizes are too different.
(Georgia is a bit larger than Times.) So if you use <TT> or <PRE> on a page,
stick with the default fonts for body text. (Helvetica section headers or
titles look OK though.)
5. Verdana only looks good at <FONT SIZE="-1"> or <FONT SIZE="-2">. It's
too thin at the default font size. Unfortunately, if you specify -1 and you
don't specify Helvetica as a back-up, then Times looks terrible at -1. (And
Times looks really terrible at -2.)
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Different fonts in webpages
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| (...) I shouldn't say Verdana _only_ looks good at -1 and -2. It also looks good at very large sizes. It just looks terrible at the default default size. But YMMV, of course. Sometimes people change their settings from the installation defaults (the (...) (25 years ago, 11-Oct-99, to lugnet.publish)
| | | Re: Different fonts in webpages
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| On this past discussion of fonts, I began to wonder... I looked at the page of common MS fonts, and the main font on my webpage is not listed. Its called Papyrus LET, and the other font I use a lot is Comic Sans MS (which is fairly common, I (...) (25 years ago, 28-Oct-99, to lugnet.publish)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Different fonts in webpages
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| (...) Agreed. I never specify font, only size and face. However I HAVE seen people (including here at Lugnet(tm) I think but I could be too wrong and too lazy to check, I am in a hotel and paying for my 800# access) name off a bazillion font types (...) (25 years ago, 11-Oct-99, to lugnet.publish)
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