[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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