[Design][Cosmo][Sum]Fonts for Cosmo (Web) UI
Priscilla Chung
priscilla at osafoundation.org
Wed Aug 30 18:43:52 PDT 2006
The Issue:
The design specifies slightly different fonts for each OS: Lucida
Grande for Mac, Tahoma for PC and Arial or Helvetica for Linux.
Matthew expressed concern on how to maintain different stylesheets
for different OS.
The final decision was:
+ One stylesheet only.
+ The team agreed to make use of fallbacks in the font declaration.
The font faces will go from least common to most common. This should
solve the problem.
+ The final tag would look something like .classname {font: 12pt/14pt
Lucida Grande, Tahoma, Arial, Sans Serif}
To reiterate some of the comments made from the discussion:
Matthew's main concern were about maintaining different style sheets:
If there were more then one universal font, then it would be
difficult to keep track of and keep consistent over different
browsers and platforms. This also makes it difficult when the
designer, developer and the user are not seeing the same thing,
specifically spacing, text wrapping etc.
Jeremy gave some background on font rendering issues Mac/Windows and
the different fonts he's had to deal with. A solution proposed is to
do a font fall back on CSS which is not painful and probably
acceptable to please both worlds.
JohnT commented on a book by Zeldman, that you're basically limited
to what the user has installed on their computers when the OS is
installed. To code your CSS to provide fallback depending on the OS
or you have to have OS/Browser specific stylesheets.
There was further discussion about the ordering of font faces in the
font declaration. Matthew was concerned about the rendering quality
of Tahoma on the Mac. Bobby pointed out that Mac users only have
Tahoma if they have MS Office, but it is not a standard font. In any
case, Lucida Grande is not available on Windows.
-Priscilla
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