Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/25/07 23:01

Scripsit Ben C:

> In CSS "normal" line-height is supposed to be between 1.0 and 1.2
> times font-height

CSS specifications are particularly confused and confusing in this issue.
Typical browser defaults are less than 1.2 and typically too small for
Arial, which is everyone's and his brother's choice in web authoring these
days.

> But how this looks depends a lot on the font.

Surely, but people tend to set font without thinking of line height at all.

> In some fonts line
> spacing looks quite crunched up at 1.0,

All normal fonts look very crunched that way, since 1.0 makes ascenders
touch (or even cross - font size is a tricky concept) the descenders of the
line above them.

> but in others too spaced out at 1.1.

That would be an odd font.

> When you say margin, do you mean paragraph margin? The default
> stylesheet for CSS 2.1 sets 1.12em for some reason.

The reason is that it sets line height to 1.12, to the margin corresponds to
one empty line. This reflects the typewriter tradition.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]