On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, vwf wrote: > Different font-series have different x-heights.
Yes, and the difference can be rather big. > Normally you give list > of font-names to choose from. Unfortunately, some fonts will show bigger > than others on the list. This can have a negative effect on readability. Indeed. This is the basic reason why many people warn against using fonts with a large x-height (such as Verdana) for copy text. To make the font size reasonable to his (or his boss's) eyes, an author who makes such a font the primary one will usually set font size to something fairly small. Then people using systems where that font is not available will see some different font in a size that may be much too small for them. There's no good solution to this at present. Setting copy text font as a percentage lets IE users enlargen the font and might be seen as an acceptable compromise. Another approach is to make the font-family list contain fonts with similar characteristics with respect to the x-height, but this gets difficult, especially since the x-height is not the only feature to be considered when choosing fonts. > Is it possible to set the size of a font, based on the font selected by > the browser? That was the general idea behind the font-size-adjust property in CSS 2, but it was not generally implemented, and it has been removed from the CSS 2.1 drafts. It is now supported by Firefox 2, though, and you might therefore use it to benefit _some_ users, but it won't help the majority. Note that information about x-height of fonts is generally unreliable: it is partly incorrect in many otherwise reputable sources. For a simple utility for estimating the x-height of a font, as well as table of x-height for some common fonts, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/x-height.html -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
