Re: [orca-list] Fonts in ubuntu/windows

[Mallory van Achterberg <stommepoes stommepoes nl>]

Hi,
Every operating system has its own set of fonts. Every CSS developer
has to deal with the fact that the best you can hope for is a decent
"font stack". That's your list of fonts, where the browser will
display the first one supported by the operating system, and if none
are then it uses the base font-family (serif, sans-serif, monospace).

I know of a web site I use personally to determine my font stacks,
however it's a visual list that I use to eyeball. This is because
many fonts have larger-than-normal x-heights (Verdana, Georgia) while
others have smaller-than-normal x-heights (most of the newer fonts
that came with Windows Vista, the ones who start with C. Also
Tahoma is another smallish one). So the idea is, try to pair larger
x-height fonts together, and smaller x-height fonts together. The
worst thing you can do is have a font stack with something like 
Calibri on the front (a tiny Vista font) with Verdana near the back.

Also when making a font stack you might want to decide if you want
to put the most "popular" (Windows or most-cross-browser fonts) first.

If you want to be a bit more certain with your font sizes, you can
apt-get msttcorefonts (I believe that is the name in the repository)
and have many of the popular fonts found on Windows, some of which
are also on Macs (Arial, Helvetica, Verdana).

I use the em unit when sizing most text, but depending on how
experienced you are, they do not start out intuitive for many people.
I like em's because they can start out with the users' own base font
size, by setting html, body elements to 100% font size. Setting a %
unit for font-size on the body also happens to get around a bug in 
IE7 when people resize or zoom in it.
Em's are also nice because they allow IE users to use text-enlarge to
enlarge the text. They can always zoom, but text-enlarge will do
nothing if you use px units; Microsoft believes a pixel is a pixel.

Assuming your plain body text is then 100% or 1em (the users' set
base), you can set your headings to something larger than that
(1.6em or 160% for h1, 1.4em or 140% for h2, etc). Sometimes using
larger sizes like 1.6 or 1.4 with default margins can make the
heading look too far away from the text it heads, so you might want
to adjust margins and line-height to make certain the heading is
closer to the text it heads than the text that came before.

If you want that URL I mentioned earlier that I use for eyeballing
fonts (she lists Windows+Vista+installed programs fonts, Mac fonts,
and Ubuntu for "Linux" fonts), I can post it. The web site is called
"A padded cell" and usually I find it by typing that name and "fonts"
into DuckDuckGo.
cheers,
Mallory
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 09:20:50PM -0400, Andy B. wrote:
> I am working on a web project. I noticed that the fonts in Ubuntu are not
> even close to the ones in windows. For instance, a heading level 1 in
> windows is arial 17pt. The same heading in Ubuntu is liberation sans 13pt.
> since it seems like the heading is displayed in a larger font size/style
> than Ubuntu, it seems like it would mix up the entire screen, and I would
> have to recalculate everything/take into account for all types of Oss. Can
> someone explain the font style/size difference?
>
>  

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