[Design] Fonts for the Web UI

[Matthew Eernisse]

Jeremy Epstein wrote:
> 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.

Tahoma is indeed supported on the Mac. I believe it's installed along 
with MS Office -- which is where you get Verdana as well. They're both 
on my Mac here, and I did not install either of them.

As you say, doing font fallback in CSS is not painful. The annoyance is 
in hoping the order you choose will somehow ensure that your per-OS font 
choices fall into place. And unfortunately you don't always know what 
fonts may or may not be installed despite what the OS is.

Although having said that, after a bit more research, it would appear 
that the chance of a Windows user having specifically 'Lucida Grande' is 
virtually nil. They'd have to go out of their way to find and download a 
converted-to-Windows version of it. So if the issue is just making sure 
the Mac people get that Mac-only font, we could put specifically 'Lucida 
Grande' first. Then there ought to be no worries about the Windows 
Lucida fonts with ClearType turned off.

The only real issue then would be the problem of the designers not 
seeing the same thing that developers and users see -- e.g., label 
widths and other strings of text wrapping or not wrapping, and so on. If 
we think that's worth the cost of getting a specific font for the Mac 
folks, I'm happy to try that.


Matthew