Posted by Dylan Parry on 10/25/07 21:18

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

>> IE7 appears to be choosing the hyphen glyph from Arial Unicode MS,
>> which as a larger font causes the display error I experienced.
>
> It's not really larger or, rather, the size does not matter as such.
> What matters is that it has an x-height larger than your basic font,
> and HYPHEN (as well as HYPHEN-MINUS, which has identical glyph in
> Arial Unicode MS) is normally placed near half of the x-height. So
> when it appears near letters from another font, the odds are that it
> appears in too high a vertical position.

That's what I meant, just didn't say it quite so eloquently.

> This indicates that font mixing is rather problematic. You could set
> you page's font to Arial Unicode MS and have a uniform appearance
> where HYPHEN looks OK - but only when that font is available, and
> it's really not a great font. You might set it to Cambria or Calibri,
> which might be fine for people who have it - but they're still a
> minority. Using Lucida Sans Unicode is questionable for several
> reasons. Finally, you could use a font-family setting with a nice
> list of fonts, but those fonts would be rather different from each
> other, so what would you base your styling on? (Font choice tends to
> affect many design choices. For example, Arial Unicode MS tends to
> require a fairly large line-height, which would not be that nice to
> Calibri.)

I've actually taken to using "calibri, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" in
my CSS recently.

I like the way that Calibri (body text) and Cambria (headings) look, but
also acknowledge that not many people have those particular fonts yet,
so Arial/Helvetica and Times New Roman/Times are not bad as substitutes,
although both have slightly larger x-heights than Calibri/Cambria so the
pages do look overall a little different, but equally as readable.

I've actually taken to applying traditional typesetting techniques to my
online texts and started to write stylesheets working on a baseline with
text, line-height and margin all relative to each other. It really does
make text so much more visually appealing and easier on the eye.

>> despite it being such a commonly-used character,
>
> This depends on your definition of "character". As an element of
> coded character sets, HYPHEN is rarely used.

Indeed. I was referring to its use within the English language in
general, and more specifically on paper with a pencil (or even in
printed literature) as opposed to on the Web.

>> and as such I'll have to stick to the damned hyphen-minus, the
>> illegitimate child of ASCII :)
>
> Yes, it'll have to do the job of HYPHEN. But you can use EN DASH as a
> dash (in punctuation, in denoting ranges, etc.) and the MINUS SIGN as
> a mathematical operator. They work pretty well these days, both in
> text processing and on web pages.

That's my plan. I've been happy enough with the results of using EN
dash, EM dash and various other types of dash; it was only the hyphen
that was inconsistent.

--
Dylan Parry
http://electricfreedom.org | http://webpageworkshop.co.uk

The opinions stated above are not necessarily representative of
those of my cats. All opinions expressed are entirely your own.

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