[Design] Fonts for the Web UI

[Bobby Rullo]

Not everyone has MS Office d00d.

On Aug 9, 2006, at 4:23 PM, Matthew Eernisse wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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