When I inspect elements on my site using the Chrome developer tool, I see the following as my element's "Computed" style:
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Medium", "Helvetica Neue Medium", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Roboto", Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif
But if I scroll down further (to the bottom of the "Computed" tab) I see:
Rendered Fonts
Liberation Sans—Local file(11 glyphs)
Since my (Linux) OS must have Arial and sans-serif, I'm confused as to why Chrome would pick "Liberation Sans": it isn't even on my font-family list.
I'd blame my own bad CSS, but in theory the "Computed" tab shows the final/processed version of my rules, so however terrible my original CSS may have been, Chrome clearly sees my font-family list defined (and being applied) to my element ... it just ignores it.
Can anyone explain this mystery?
EDIT: I installed a font-checking program and it turns out that Linux (Mint) does not in fact come with an Arial or sans-serif font ... but even so, I thought browsers provided (at least) a basic sans-serif font, no matter what the OS? Is that incorrect?
Your font stack specifies Arial.
Arial is not present on most Linux systems for licensing reasons, and it is usually aliased to Liberation Sans, since Liberation Sans has the same dimensions (metrics) as Arial. The font design, however, is different (that's why Liberation Sans is usually not the default Linux sans serif font, its design is not popular).
Helvetica is another well-known legacy font name usually not present. If you try to use it in the font stack it will usually trigger all kinds of aliasing. It may even trigger the Liberation Sans alias before Arial (since Arial was Microsoft's poor-man Helvetica replacement when windows launched and has about the same metrics).
(When you create a PDF that specifies Helvetica on Windows it will usually substitute ArialMT).
If you only specify sans-serif you will get the system "best" sans-serif font, usually clean well-loved designs, but their dimensions vary widely from system to system.
Due to the number of broken web sites whose designers assume all systems ship with the same fonts, with identical pixel widths that can be fixed in the page design, font substitution is usually done on metric first, design second priorities.
The only way to get the same font on all clients is to use web fonts, but that will slow down your site due to the font download and users (not "designers") prefer fast pages. Web fonts demand to be careful about licensing and font unicode coverage, security-conscious users will block third-party downloads, and there is a lot of cargo-culting about obscure web font formats (opentype is sufficient in most browsers nowadays).
The kind of Apple maniac that thinks HelveticaNeue is the alpha and omega is usually satisfied with Open Sans as web font.
But even with web fonts the rendering will be slightly different since different systems use different text engines that all have their specifics, with some fonts working better than others for a given engine.
There are two font fallback mechanisms in Chrome for Linux. One is OS-level fallback. Another one is CSS specified fallback. The OS-level fallback mechanism returns Liberation Sans to Chrome instead of none or not found while Chrome asking if the HelveticaNeue available in your OS. Chrome takes the returned Liberation Sans and believes OS returned answer so ignores the CSS subsequent font fallback list.
I see that you have both Helvetica and Arial in your font-family properties. I'm guessing that you want Arial when Helvetica is not available...An answered question that deals with this is: two fonts
Now, if I wanted to have only one font-family, such as Century Gothic, I would do:
font-family: "Century Gothic", CenturyGothic, AppleGothic, Sans-Serif;
This is a good guide.
My question is, why do you have so many
Because Google Chrome, somethiing leave the WWW from the url, you can try to put it manually.
Especially in Unix or Mac system.
Related
I understand that web safe fonts have a high chance of being install on most OS. Looking at http://www.cssfontstack.com/ shows what OS has which font installed. However, what I can't seem to find any information for is if web safe fonts are internationally safe as well, that is, will the font render in any language?
I looked at tons of international sites to look at their font stacks, and this is what I found:
Arabic & Persian: Verdana, Arial, Tahoma
https://www.drupal.org/node/695128
Pashto (Afghanistan): Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana
http://atra.gov.af/ps
Chinese: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Hiragino Sans GB", "Microsoft YaHei" ,"微软雅黑", Arial "宋体","Arial Narrow"
https://gist.github.com/feimoslong/3496114
http://www.kendraschaefer.com/2012/06/chinese-standard-web-fonts-the-ultimate-guide-to-css-font-family-declarations-for-web-design-in-simplified-chinese/
Japanese: "Lato", "Meiryo", "メイリオ", "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro", Osaka, "ＭＳ Ｐゴシック", "MS PGothic", sans-serif; Helvetica, HirakakuProN-W3
Japanese standard web fonts
http://www.gov-online.go.jp/data_room/calendar/event/201603.html#nousongyoson
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C-86390
Hindi (India): Arial,Verdana,Tahoma, Helvetica, mangal (lots of website use nato sans or source sans web font)
http://www.sewayojan.org/Default3.aspx?l=0
http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/DoIT/delhi+govt+hindi/home
http://www.livehindustan.com/news/national/article1-mp-govt-in-trouble-with-nilgai-because-of-cow-will-change-name-519355.html
Hebrew: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica
http://www.gov.il/firstgov
http://www.pmo.gov.il/Pages/default.aspx
Urdu (Pakistan): "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif
http://javedch.com/pakistan/2016/03/01/143024
Thai: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif
http://newdelhi.thaiembassy.org/th/
http://www.iadopa.org/
From inspecting these sites, I see that each web safe font gets mapped to a font file on my OS that has the characters needed to render the language. For example, when Arial is used for a site in Hindi, I see that the font Kohinoor Devanagari is used for any missing characters from the Arial font.
So here are my questions: will a web safe font always map to a font on any OS/device that can render the language? By using a web safe font can I translate my site into any language without needing to change the font for that language?
You probably already know this, but different regions don't really have their own specific fonts. In a lot of regions websites will go with the system default font, because the language of the region is pictorial (if you thought downloading a webfont was slow, imagine downloading the entire Japanese character set)
The best you can probably do is go with a common stack of fonts that OS's have installed. Medium have a great post on how they prioritize system fonts for their UI components, and the accidental time travel they encountered on the way.
In the end, sans-serif is your friend. I once had to check how a website looked on a PlayStation Vita console on it's built in Internet Browser, which actually avoids downloading webfonts and opts instead for it's own sans-serif font, which has characters for both Latin and non-Latin based languages in one (very big) character library.
Of course, there are many cases where even in non-Latin languages English words are used instead of a local translation (brand names, acronyms) - this is often where I've seen Times New Roman bleed into Asian websites, because it was my browser's (and probably yours) default font to render in the absence of any specific CSS declaration.
If you think from the context of someone seeing a English word in the middle of a Chinese article, they're probably more likely to recognize an English word in Times New Roman than, say, Tahoma. I've even seen that some Asian Cartoons have English text in Times New Roman. While in the West that's we may find it an eye-sore, in countries that don't use latin characters any deviation from the style of the character can compromise the meaning of the word, or change it entirely.
But anyways. I'd recommend trying a leaf from Medium's book. If you feel like displaying a different font, then by all means you can, CSS is great in that respect that it will silently fall back to the next best thing. You'll never get it perfect, but as long as everyone can read your text, they'll be able be able to understand it.
P.S Always keep sans-serif at the end ;)
I have noticed that at Google Fonts they never use fantasy as fallback class in font-family. For all script and typical fantasy fonts, they use cursive.
I wonder if this is a hint that chrome does not support fantasy as fallback class? For that to be the case, fallback font-classes would have to be handled by the browser via implemented lists for typical serif, sans-serif etc. fonts. Alternatively, the browser could query the os for such lists?
What happens when the browser needs to fallback to say a serif font on the clients system? How will it get info on the installed serif fonts?
I haven't been able to find an aswer to this, so I hope that someone here might know about it. I know web safe fonts and all that are probably about to become things of the past, but they still have some relevance.
Typefaces don't map to any generic font families mechanically. They're only categorized that way in their family names and on font listings such as Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit.
You could create a font stack that consists of a sans-serif family, a serif family, and ends with the fantasy keyword:
font-family: Helvetica, 'Times New Roman', fantasy;
And browsers would treat it the same: use whichever family comes first that is supported, or fall back to the generic family if it comes to that.
I would expect all browsers to implement at least the five generic families defined in CSS2.1 and css-fonts-3: serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, and monospace. But which faces each generic family maps to exactly is less predictable — for one, most browsers actually offer the user the ability to change their preferred default serif, sans-serif and monospace families. And even then, the entire list of installed fonts is available for selection in every category, which suggests that even browsers can't (or at least don't) differentiate between categories of fonts.
The default preferences that a browser ships with are based on assumptions of which fonts are most likely to be preinstalled on any given system.
I can't answer why Google Fonts doesn't seem to specify fantasy in any of its font stacks.
I've set up a test case:
http://codepen.io/jaycrisp/pen/NxOrOy
.cursive {
font-family: cursive;
}
.fantasy {
font-family: fantasy;
}
I see different fonts in chrome on mac, so that shows that chrome does support the fantasy keyword. I see the same font on Safari and Chrome too.
I'm seeing papyrus for the fantasy font, which I think is a Mac OS bundled font. I'm also seeing the same font on Firefox and Safari.
I would guess that the reason google font uses cursive instead of fantasy is that if you're using such a font, you're probably going for a very specific look to your site. Replacing this font with something like papyrus is going to totally ruin it. Well, using Papayrus will totally ruin your site anyway, but that's another matter.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/QVBGx.png
It is pretty evident that my site renders different on Chrome and FF7 on my Win7 machine
I am using this:
h1, h2 {font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Arial; }
Does anybody can point me how can I even these diffs? I don't want fonts with different 'feelings' on each browser.
The font, Lucida Grande is installed in my Windows machine
EDIT:
font-weight: normal !important
doesn't work either
It looks like the two browsers are rendering it with a different weight.
I can think of two possibilities, though I don't know if either are correct.
You requested a bold font, but that font is not available in bold. One browser is just showing the regular, non-bold variant unchanged, whereas the other has processed it to look bold.
You requested a particular weight of font, say "bold" or "600" but the installed fonts do not precisely match that weighting. One browser is substituting an "extra-bold" variant of font, and the other a "regular-bold", or something of this nature.
If either of these is correct you could play around with the font-weight CSS property to try and alter it. But then that may affect substitution of whichever font is chosen in the case that it is viewed on a system with no Lucida Grande font at all.
Fonts will always render slightly different from one browser to another, but that was a bit more difference than usual. Probably because the headers have font-weight: bold; as default, and the font doesn't have a bold variation so the browsers create the bold style from the regular weight in different ways.
Anyway, you might want to use more common fonts. On my Windows 7 machine there is neither Lucida Grande nor Helvetica Neue, so it would render using Arial. Still, I have the additional fonts that come with both MS Office and Photoshop, so I have a lot more fonts installed than you can expect from a standard system.
Also, you should always specify a generic font as the last resort, in this case sans serif, otherwise it would render using the default font if none of the fonts are installed, which is something like Times Roman which has a completely different look. Perhaps also adding Helvetica, which is the closest equivalent of Arial on non-Windows systems.
In various browsers, when a specific font is used (e.g. - Helvetica Neue), if that font is not found, the first font in the immediate family is used. So if I were to specify that Arial Narrow was the base font style for an element and my reader did not have this font, it would travel to the first available Arial font the system could find.
As an exercise, many sites like the Helvetica fonts (particularly the 'Neue' and 'Condensed' versions). They typically specify font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; believing that the browser will travel along this particular path and each font should be yummy with the first listed being the yummiest. However, Firefox/IE/Chrome (so I assume webkit browsers) all will fail to the find the specific Helvetica font required and move directly to the first font they encounter in the Helvetica family. One would think this would be Helvetica, but on my system it was defaulting to Helvetica 95 Black. I even tried renaming the font file to see if that was the cause, and no matter the filename, the result was that the page would default to Helvetica Black. I've found this to be the case with Arial as well.
So other than attempting to account for every single flavor of Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, ad infinitum, is there a way to force the browser to stop "guessing" at the family and accept only the exact font in question?
For starters, here's a description of the font matching algorithm as outlined in the CSS 2.1 specification (or CSS 3, if you prefer). This is a tricky issue though, as is evidenced by the disclaimer before the algorithm's details are outlined:
Because there is no accepted, universal taxonomy of font properties, matching of properties to font faces must be done carefully. The properties are matched in a well-defined order to insure that the results of this matching process are as consistent as possible across UAs (assuming that the same library of font faces is presented to each of them).
Also, note that you must enclose any font name containing whitespace with either single or double quotes, as per section 15.3.
How to make cross browser, cross platform and all devices compatible css font stack?
You cannot guarantee the fonts that will be used on a mobile device the same way you can guarantee which fonts are available on a normal computer.
A safe bet is to use a generic font family that can be interpreted by the mobile browser to show you the relevant font, e.g.
font-family: serif; /* (e.g., Times) */
font-family: sans-serif; /* (e.g., Helvetica) */
font-family: monospace; /* (e.g., Courier) */
The best solution is to always supply a generic font family after any specific fonts:
font-family: "Foo Regular", "Bar Sans", sans-serif;
Maybe this link can give you some more ideas:
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
Using the above font families never gave me problems.
Perhaps this can help you on your quest: Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite
It points out in 15.3 of the W3C Recommendation regarding the 'font-family' property that you should have fallback fonts in a font stack so that your website visitor has some viable choices.
The 'web safe' font stacks I use, which cover most if not all devices are as follows:
/* Web Safe Font Stacks (classes set in CSS) */
.head {font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif}
.para {font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif}
.mono {font-family:'Courier New',Courier,monospace}
.fant {font-family: Papyrus,Impact,fantasy}
.curs {font-family:'Apple Chancery','Lucida Calligraphy',cursive}
This covers headers, paragraphs, monospace for code samples, fantasy for special items, and cursive for emphasis. You may just need one for headers (H1~H6) and another for body text:
body {font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif}
Check the following cheatsheet from 2010 that includes Linux and iOS. It gives the average percentages for usage between Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS: Web Safe Fonts
Some "Web Safe Fonts" links from Google top:
https://www.cssfontstack.com/
http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html
Forget about cross browser cross platform font stacks, the web examples usually only care about windows and OSX for basic latin, they fail on international languages and Linux, and new form factors.
Linux never used the same fonts as Windows and OSX for licensing reasons, and font design tools have become mature enough you find a lot of diversity nowadays (not that creating a large encoding font is easy, but a lot of users only care about fonts that cover their particular language).
Font creation has become cheap enough big corporations (including mobile manufacturers) now like to differentiate by commissioning new fonts for big releases (new device or major OS version).
When font surveys were still popular the DejaVu font family had a lot of reach on Linux, that may not be the case anymore. DejaVu and Arial have different metrics.
Just use generic CSS font families in your stack, avoid any helvetica derivative, do not use a design that depends on particular font metrics and you'll be ok.