I have a web page with text and an image. I want to place the text very precisely over the image.
I have discovered that with the font I am using, when viewing the page on windows, everything gets shifted down by about 4px. On Mac, iphone and android, it is placed correctly.
This does not happen if I use Courier New as the font, so I know that the problem is the font, however I have no choice but to use this font.
Is there a way to compensate for this purely in CSS, or do I need a javascript callback to detect windows and add a class so I can deal with it?
first of all, I would try tuning ling height, if that did not work, then I think you need to edit the font itself, you can do that using this site: https://transfonter.org/, uploading your font file and convert it to the formats you use and the important point is to check this toggle button, it adjusts some properties in the font so it has similar experience on different operating systems
if that did not work, there is a program called fontforge it gives you the ability to change font metrics, for more info you could check this question
Font Rendering / Line-Height Issue on Mac/PC (outside of element)
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For the project I'm working on we have a custom set of icons, which I converted into a font using https://glyphter.com/ (just googled this type of service and it seemed okay).
Inside one of the block I'm inserting an icon with the class from the CSS generated by the service (like you normally do with an icon font).
And suddenly the displayed icon is wrong - though the content property is okay.
Also could not find any other interfering styles which could do that.
Sorry, no code here, got no time for that. Also the project is quite restricted in terms of sharing details.
So after half a day of looking for a problem and trying different scenarios, it appeared, that the icon font generated had the same icons for the letters in both upper and lower case. And yes, the set started on the letters, not with an extended UTF-8 table (or whatever).
So the parent element had text-transform: uppercase which changed the icon without changing the content or else.
Maybe someone will find this info helpful.
My manager tells me not to use icon fonts on our websites, as it is another http request plus the extra kBs to download. Also because I would have to use content before for the font (I can't change the html), he prefers background images so it works in IE7.
Personally I love the little things, so nice and crisp and resizeable!
I get it if we only use a couple of icons on a website but if I would use, say 5 icons on a site - what do you guys think? Is it worth using an icon font or is he right thinking that it is not?
I am just a sucker for anything new and exciting, and this year it is the retina display.
Icon fonts and high density screens
Using icon fonts will be more and more relevant as more high resolution/density displays become available.
A 16×16px icon can look horrible on a high density display (>300ppi). It may either display incredibly small or unsharp due to automatic scaling. A 1em font icon on the other hand will render correctly and sharply regardless of screen density.
It of course all boils down to your
application users and
your requirements (IE7 seems to be the major breaker)
For now sprites are the way to go.
Downsides?
Icon fonts have a different problem as well. All icons are single colour. There's no font standard as of yet to have multi-colour capability. And it likely won't be. At least not for fonts. There are possibilities of doing multi-colour using SVG fonts which isn't a font standard/format per se but can be font container and used as a font delivery mechanism in your browser. Doing multi-colour icons as SVG fonts makes it possible to have colourful scalable icons (thanks to #Joey).
Vectorised icon images would better suit full colour resizeable icons.
Requests and font icons
Your boss' argument about additional request are simply false. It doesn't really matter whether your icons are part of a file or (in best case) part of a sprite image.
Both yield an HTTP request to fetch the resource. File size heavily depends on complexity and format but it may be that sprite image will be smaller. But having a few kilo larger font file doesn't really make much difference. They both get cached on the client afterwards.
I personally use Font Awesome as my primary resource for fonts, In my case I load it from the CDN hopping other pages that use it already fetched it and this was cached by the browser.
If file size is a concern, I can recommend to you this incredible awesome tool
http://fontello.com/
It allows you to merge several fonts into one single file, and only includes the icons you actually use.
http://www.icnfnt.com/ does the same for fontawesome, but I kinda like more fontello because it allows to use more fonts.
icon fonts is the way to go honestly in my opinion...
EDIT I lately have being using this app a lot too: http://icomoon.io/
When you use fonts, different browsers on different platforms will give different results. PNG files will give stable and independence results.
I have implemented a font icon library using icomoon and it works well on all the browsers including ie7. For small sets of icons this is a suitable practice, the font's scale properly, can be changed to any colour you require and you don't have to worry about PNG/GIF transparent background colours matching.
However... If your library becomes larger (mine is now around 40 icons), it becomes increasing difficult to maintain. If the designer ceases to work on the project, or you need to change the icons, it is a laborious process to update the fonts. Everything then needs to be retested. It is also difficult to dynamically icons using CSS (for ie7).
So, given the difficulty of maintenance, I'm considering switching back to a series of sprites (of different colours). The reasons being:
Any designer can easily add a new icon to the set.
The CSS doesn't need to be retested or altered.
You don't have to screw around with javascript workarounds for IE.
You don't need javascript at all.
For retina displays, simply create a verion of the sprite at twice the size,. You will probably need to have a different version of the CSS for retina regardless, as all the other images on your site will have the same density problem.
I would recommend 2 solutions to your problem these is what i would use for best customers support like they wanna change the text, size or other stuff
Use Fontsquirrel to make a webfont and embed it in your website trough your css and add it in your ftp directory if thats not getting pretty then use google web fonts
If non of that looks like it should i would go for the image solution your boss said..
All this also depend on which amount of time you have to solve your problem and such
Btw if you cant access the html i thought you could access the css which you can do trough most backends, if you cant then go for the image!
Last but not least, if you decide to go with the image solution, make a sprite which you direct trough on a background position. This way you only have to load 1 picture for all your little icons.
He's right. I'd use css sprites in this case. And if you have to support ie7 (I'm so sorry) you don't really have any options. Exploring those things on your own - of course, you never know what will come in handy or when.
My client (who is obsessed with pixel perfection) dislikes the way browsers render font-face fonts.
At the moment I am using font-squirrel to convert OTF fonts to webfonts.
The problem is, I don't see any alternatives. I could create a PNG file holding all these texts, but that doesn't sound like a browser-user-friendly solution.
The typical example of a design I have to work on is:
What would be your approach?
I'm assuming that by "dislikes the way browsers render #font-face" your'e referring to the blink which happens. If not, you should elaborate.
The top one is web-font and the bottom one is screengrab from PSD. Both using same font family, same spacing. The client wants to look it more like the bottom one.
I'm assuming that by "dislikes the way browsers render #font-face" your'e referring to the blink which happens. If not, you should elaborate.
Currently there's only 3 options to remove that blink. The first two are obvious solutions - use images, or use web safe fonts. These, obviously, defeat the purpose.
The third option is to embed base64 code for the fonts in your CSS. This increases the size (kb) of your CSS files, but it will completely eliminate the blink which tends to occur because the font is loaded with the CSS so there's no blink when a secondary file is loaded.
usage for including bas64 fonts looks like this:
#font-face {
font-family: "FontName";
src: url("data:font/opentype;base64,[ the base64 code here ]");
}
There are a few online bas64 converters that you can feed a .otf file to and they'll spit out the base64 code. Here's one such converter.
An approach that I have used is to create background images to represent all display-text, and then use CSS to "hide" the actual text, and show only the image. For the sake of accessibility, the text should not be hidden using display:none or display:hidden though. Instead, use a large negative text indent to move the text off the left side of the display, or put it in a nested, absolutely-positioned element somewhere outside of the display area.
I usually use the negative indentation for all text not contained in a clickable element, and the nested, absolutely positioned element technique for anything that is contained in a clickable element (so the active element outline does not expand off the left side as can happen in some browsers).
Another common and popular way of handling this is automatic font replacement (using JavaScript). This solution is friendly to users of screen readers, because the HTML contains plain text and the replacement is done using JavaScript, in the browser.
An example of this is technique is sIFR, which is open source and uses Flash as the replacement.
It looks like it has been bolded. Try setting font-weight to normal.
Is it normal that fonts I used to create site layout are pixelated? I use Georgia, and in photoshop I've smooth lines everything looks great. But when I tried to slice it up and code the css, Georgia font same size looks noticeably uglier!
What are your thoughts?
p.s. I use em to declare sizes in css.
That's because photoshop is using anti-alias technique on text.
Both OS and browser will impact the appearance of text in web page.For example, Mac OS has anti-alias text on all system UI. For windows, I believe they have an option called 'ClearType', once switched on all system UI will have smooth texts.
All fonts on the web will look a little pixellated unless you're on a Mac which renders type considerably better than PC.
The best way I have found to replicate how a font will look on the web is to set the Anitialiasing in Photoshop to 'sharp'.
It is conceivable that there will be CSS markup in the future that will allow antialiasing in the browser rather than OS based.
It is a common problem.
See this article
http://jontangerine.com/log/2007/10/smoothing-out-the-creases-in-web-fonts
The alternative is to use something like Cufon that generates images for your text. Best practice would be to only use it for headings.
http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
I've found this too - each browser renders fonts differently. I often find fonts look much better in IE. Sometimes I opt to use images created in PS to get that smooth look, but for the most part I think people are used to how fonts are rendered in their browser of choice.
In photoshop, there's an option to "smooth" text.
See this image. Bottom right corner.
Remove this anti-alising to have a better view (but not exact) of how the font will look in browser.
i've actually never encounter this problem before. I usually start designing my layout in photoshop then transfer it to my page.
Somehow, lately i've been using georgia font alot, and i love it when the style is italic, but what comes out in photoshop does not reflect back in the webpage when i set it in css.
in the pic above, 1. is what i saw in photoshop and what i wanted, but 2. is what i got, no matter what i try changing, be it font-weight or font-size it remains as bold. I want it thinner, is there a way? I tried font-stretch too btw.
It's not the bold, it is a system font smoothing.
You are able to change (or disable as in your case) font smoothing in Photoshop, but you can't do it with CSS, unless you are using CSS3 and compatible browser.
Added: I wouldn't recommend you to even try to change the font smoothing. That's the user right - to have fonts rendered the way she likes.