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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 09/19/07 05:34
Scripsit Bergamot:
> Or here's a novel idea: leave the family out altogether and let your
> visitors decide for themselves what font to use.
In special cases, that idea might fire back. Suppose that you use characters
that do not commonly appear in fonts that are used as default fonts by
browsers. Say, the diameter sign (U+2300, occurring fairly often in
technical texts but seldom in fonts) or "h" with caron (U+021F, probably
used only in Romani (= gypsee) language as written in Finland) or the ezh
letter (U+0292, used as a phonetic symbol in IPA and as a letter in some
languages). If you don't set the font family at all in your CSS code (or in
HTML markup), _most_ users will just symbols of unrepresentable characters.
That's because they are using IE with Times New Roman as the default font.
On Firefox, the users will probably see all the characters, but many of them
will appear as picked up from fonts other than the rest. Such things happen
even in printed matter, for quite similar reasons. They can be a typographic
nightmare.
Surely they can fix the situation by changing the browser's default font. Do
they know how to do that? Will they do that? If they switch the font to,
say, Arial Unicode MS (assuming they have it), they will probably see all
the characters. But then they will have to switch it back to something else,
since otherwise _all_ pages that do not specify font family (and that means
a lot of pages that concentrate on presenting useful content) will appear in
that font, which is fairly dull - and has no real italics or real bold face.
(Does this matter? It does. Fake italics look real bad and even wrong for
many characters, e.g. "\" or Cyrillic letters.)
If, on the other hand, the author checks the character repertoire he uses
and writes down a font-family list containing fonts so that each of them has
all the characters needed, such as
body { font-family: Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode }
then most users will see all the characters properly. Perhaps not in the
best possible font, but you can't win them all.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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