[Design] Fonts for the Web UI

[Jeremy Epstein]

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.
>
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