Re: [css-fonts] Specifying changes to parameters for fallback fonts
Florian Rivoal <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.web.css.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On May 26, 2016, at 00:58, [email protected] wrote: > > since we don't have an automatic notification system in place yet, and since the discussion is beginning to assume some momentum, i thought i'd send one manually to the list: > > r12a has created an issue for https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts: > > == [css-fonts] Specifying changes to parameters for fallback fonts == > After another session of fruitless wrestling with fonts, i thought i > should make sure (a) i'm not missing something obvious, and (b) if > not, ask whether we can improve CSS. > > This time i was trying to get a particular look across Mac- and > Windows-based browsers. On the Mac i like the look of Helvetica Neue > with font-weight set to 300 at a font size of 16px. But i can't find > anything to match that in Windows standard fonts – well, i could get > reasonably close, but i'd need to be able to change the font weight > and the font size for a font-family name specified as a fallback. > > I've never understood why, in CSS, i can't say something like > > p { font: 'macfont' 300 16px, 'windowsfont' 500 18px, sans-serif } > > This is a much bigger problem in non-Latin scripts, where glyph > dimensions can vary widely from font to font at the same font-size. > For example, compare the same glyphs set to the exact same font-size > in Mongolian Baiti and Noto Sans Mongolian: > >  > > It's not just mongolian, this is a constant problem in arabic, and > many other scripts. > > And by the way, i thought about web fonts, but i can't help thinking > that you should be able to just use standard platform fonts if you > want to. Note that that tweaking the size/weight of such fonts would > be easier than finding fonts that look good and can be used for free > to cover the up to 15 languages we have on the i18n site, but also > we're often dealing with multiple languages on a given page for > examples etc, which also ramps up the bandwidth when using webfonts. > > What am i missing? > > See https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/126 I don't know what you're missing, but I am missing it too. No need to reach for mongolian, the same happens just fine in English. Baskerville as found on OS X vs Libre Baskerville, at the same font size and same weight, are very differently sized. I've found myself wanting to use the OS X one as a default (it's got more open type features), and the libre one as a fallback, but the size being very different makes it tricky, and font-size-adjust cannot be used to adjust only some of the fallback fonts. - Florian