With CSS, if you specify font-family: monospace;, my understanding is that the browser chooses its default/preferred monospaced font.
If that's correct, how can you determine which monospaced font your browser is using?
There are 5 generic families that can be used: "serif", "sans-serif", "cursive", "fantasy", and "monospace". When a browser sees one of those, it asks the operating system for the default font in that family.
Thus, which font a web browser uses is OS-dependent.
See Mozilla's documentation on font-family for details.
Use DevTools
Select HTML element
Search for "Rendered Fonts"
Demo
In my case, that was lucida console font. Maybe helps someone)
Related
I'm using monospace for dollar sign my website, I get the result I'm looking for on chrome / windows and mobile phone but font render different on iOS? Why is the font display different? Is there a way to fix it?
It would be helpful if you provided the CSS code that you are using but I'm guessing you are doing something like this
font-family: monospace;
The reason this looks different on different operating systems is that "monospace" doesn't actually refer to a particular font it refers to any font where "All glyphs have the same fixed width" so each browser has a different font that it uses for "monospace".
If you would like your font to be consistent across different browsers and operating systems you will need to specify a particular font. This article from MDN explains how to specify font on the web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Styling_text/Web_fonts
Chrome font for monospace is consolas , you can check each font using chrome://fonts. Think this might be useful to someone
I know this is an extremely basic and stupid question, but I seem to be having a genuinely curious problem.
When using what are supposed to be web-safe fonts like Didot, and using
header h1{
font-family: Didot, serif;
font-size: 36px;
}
my browser just displays the standard serif font.
In fact I can't seem to get it to display any web safe font, it will only display either the standard serif or sans-serif font. I know my selector is correct because I CAN change between serif and sans-serif, but I know its not displaying other web-safe fonts because I tried both Arial and Helvetica (which are both definitely web safe) and when I refreshed from one to another there was absolutely no difference in the font displayed.
I'm a complete beginner and I'm using the simplest possible beginner environment, just an html page linking to a css file which I'm opening with my browser (the url shows up as file:///C:/Users/Agent%201/Desktop/Web%20Projects/ResumeSite/index.html if that is at all relevant). I've tried opening it with both chrome and edge, same results on both
Is there something wrong with my css? Or are there limitations when just opening a local html file with my browser?
Sorry if I'm this is a really dumb question, but I really can't find an answer as to why my fonts aren't working, I've tried !important and some other weird solution I found which involves changing the selector to "header h1, header h1 *" and that did nothing.
Thank-you for any help you can provide me!
When using what are supposed to be web-safe fonts like Didot, and using...
Didot is not a "web-safe" font.
Didot is included with macOS, which may lead some web-designers to assume that it's also available on other platforms (like Windows, Linux and Android) or that those platforms have automatically-mapped equivalents (like how many browsers will map Helvetica to Arial), however that is not guaranteed.
Also, just because a typeface is included with an OS does not mean it is licensed to you to use commercially or in a website - you can be sued for publishing an OS-licensed font onto the public web without having your own font-license.
A "web-safe" font is a typeface that is broadly installed and supported by most contemporary browsers without the need for additional downloads or font installations.
Many typefaces are broadly installed, such as Microsoft's Core fonts for the web which are preinstalled on all Windows computers - and many other operating systems such as macOS either come with the same fonts or have very similar equivalents (e.g. Helvetica instead of Arial) which are automatically mapped by the browser.
The only way to determine if a font is "web-safe" is by doing your own leg-work and manually checking to see if all-or-most of your target users' devices have that typeface available. You can check font availability on Wikipedia and other sites:
macOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_macOS
Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_Microsoft_Windows
iOS: http://iosfonts.com/
Android: Consult Android's fonts.xml for the minimum set of stock fonts and default fallback mappings (e.g. "Helvetica" goes to "sans-serif").
You might notice that Android's font list is very... short. That's because the base Android OS isn't what ships on most peoples' phones: Google's layer on top of Android, and OEMs (like Samsung, etc) will add their own fonts on top, but I don't know where to get that list from at-present, sorry.
A "web-safe font stack" means that at least one of the fonts listed in a font-family property value can be safely assumed to be available for use, not that all of them are - nor that the first-preferred-font will be available.
And any font-family list can be made "safe" by adding a CSS fallback generic-family name to the end (i.e. specifying the least-preferred font). Those names are specified in the CSS Fonts Module and are:
serif
sans-serif
cursive
fantasy
monospace
In your case, the property font: Didot, serif is "web-safe" because it has the serif generic-family name at the end. Your visitors will only see the Didot font being used if they already have it installed on their computer, phone, tablet, etc.
If you do want to use Didot, then you need to publish it as a WOFF file and add it to your stylesheet with a #font-face rule: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/using-font-face/
I would like to know how chrome chooses which font to render? I am asking this because using Chrome Developer Tools I can see that the font family computed is different from the font family rendered and this is confusing. Similar questions on Stackoverflow was not of much help in this particular instance.
My computer font family looks like:
font-family: museo-sans, sans-serif, Futura;
Rendered font looks like:
Helvetica—473 glyphs
In this article, it is mentioned that chrome maps a rendered font to a the computed font listed. What does this mean exactly and why does it do that? Is there a way to control which font is rendered?
Same as any other browser: if it can't find the first font, it tries the next, and so on and so on until it runs out of rules. If no fonts match, then the font is inherited from the parent element, all the way up to the document level, where it'll just pick the browser's default font.
In this case, things are a bit weird, because the order you're showing is "a real font" followed by "a generic CSS class that always resolves, but without any guarantee as to which font that will be, just that it'll be a sans-serif font", followed by the real font "futura".
So Chrome will try museo, won't find it, sees the generic "sans-serif" and just picks a known sans-serif font for you. Usually that's something like Arial or Helvetica, but the CSS spec doesn't say anything about which font it has to be, specifically. It just needs to be a sans-serif font.
The weird part here is that the ordering you chose means that the "futura" at the end will never be checked. The browser will always find a suitable font once it hits serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, or monospace
If I have a custom font and I call it 'verdana', will that conflict with the browser's built-in verdana font? When I do:
font-family: 'verdana';
will the browser use my custom font or the built-in one?
Yes, you can use a custom font name that may coincide with the name of an installed font. It might be confusing, though, and might look suspicious (using a font illegally) to use a name like Verdana, if someone peeks at your code.
The CSS3 Fonts draft says: “If the font family name [in #font-face] is the same as a font family available in a given user's environment, it effectively hides the underlying font for documents that use the stylesheet. This permits a web author to freely choose font-family names without worrying about conflicts with font family names present in a given user's environment.”
You may find parts of this article interesting: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3080-How-Browsers-Manage-Fonts.
The short answer is that the browser should use whatever version of Verdana you have installed. The exception here is if you are using "src: url()", then it should load the font file from that URL. A good resource if that is the case: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webfonts/quick/.
If you're wanting to use your font and you worry that some browsers may just up and decide to use the local Verdana, you can rename the ttf or eot on your server and just use Verdana-Mine as the font-family and src as url('verdana-mine.ttf').
Our web designer suggested using Cambria as a font. In looking at various font references online, we couldn't find authoritative sources that listed recent (post 2010) browser support for various fonts.
Which sources do you use to determine how supported a particular font is? I'm guessing there are reports for fonts like there are for browsers, but we haven't found anything reliable yet.
I think you don't need to worry too much about native browser support for fonts. Instead you should consider two things:
Using #font-face
Using a good font stack
Combine the two and you should be safe, no matter what.
For #font-face, you can generate the font and make it cross-browser compatible.
Start by licensing the font from here ( http://new.myfonts.com/search/cambria/ ) or somewhere else.
Then generate the #font-face code with Font Squirrel ( http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator ) or another service. The result will be cross browser compatible in nearly all cases.
Finally, add the font to a font stack so that there is a fall back in case something happens with your custom Cambria font. Something like this for whichever rule you are working with: font-family: Cambria, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman, serif;
Of course, you could also choose a similar free font through Font Squirrel or use Google's Web Fonts.
More good info here: http://sixrevisions.com/css/font-face-guide/
You won't find Cambria and the other fonts in its family natively installed on computers running anything but Windows Vista and newer, and you'll only have luck on other systems if they have Office 2007/2008 and newer installed.
As long as the font is present on a user's computer, any browser should be able to handle it, even without the need for #font-face embedding. The idea of font embedding is to get a browser to recognize and use a font that isn't installed on a user's system, rather than getting the browser to understand and render the font.
You're not going to find something that works on everything. Try Cambria, Georgia, serif; Georgia's a reasonably close substitute that's very widespread, and the serif default will work anywhere.
Discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria_%28typeface%29
The browser doesn't have much to say as to the fonts it supports; they are dictated by the fonts present in the underlying OS.
It's hard to find support references for particular fonts. However, #font-face is widely supported and regardless, a good font stack with fail-safe fonts is a must-have.