I can't for the life of me figure out why the same font that I build using gulp-iconfont renders so wildly different on Windows vs. basically all other OSes, including mobile OSes. I've tested practically all of them through Browserstack, and consistently all browser running on Windows render the font with a massive amount of space above/below each icon while all other platforms render as expected.
I highlighted the elements using the inspector for the following screenshots:
Windows:
macOS:
I think I have narrowed it down to be the font rendering, as when I change the font-family in the css, the spacing around the characters evaporates. I have messed around with the gulp-iconfont options (fontHeight is set to 1024 and font is being normalized) without success.
Is my only option to let go of compiling my own iconfont and just using svg's, or does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? I feel the stench of defeat upon me so any faint scent of hope would make me simmer with joy.
I'm starting to use phonegap and phonejs to write mobile hybrid applications. I've followed the tutorial http://phonejs.devexpress.com/Documentation/Tutorial/Getting_Started/Your_First_Application and the app works but both on the emulator and on the device the widgets are extremely small (see screenshot https://db.tt/ZhdrOt0R, sorry for the volume dialog on the screenshot). Like this, the app is completely unusable. I checked the various css files for font-size and other size tags but there are so bloody many places...
This leads me to a more generic question: I'd like buttons with rounded corners, different margins etc. What's the strategy to change the style? There are so many classes, is there any how to how to address this other than in a trial-and-error fashion?
Thx
Kai
Hi when I using photoshop the fonts are so smooth and doesn't look pixelated. Now I have seen this on many different sites, how smooth the fonts are and don't look pixelated at all.
I was wondering if there was a property or something that i can use to get the text smooth in css.
For example ---> http://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/10533/text-smoothing/p1
see where it says '[Solved] Text Smoothing', how do i get the text that smooth without having to make the font oo big, I'm using "Arial Black" font on my site.
As mentioned in the link you shared quite a large degree of font smoothness has to do with the browser or OS that the type is displayed on.
For example, Windows uses ClearType technology to help smooth fonts. And yet, on a Windows machine, the font will look slightly different in each browser. I have noticed this effect while testing various sites across the major browsers.
Another thing about 'Generic' fonts (those included in most machines by default), is that the base font might differ slightly OS to OS etc. So for that reason you may look into a custon CSS3 font on your site so that you know that users with support for custom fonts will have a very similar appearance.
If you are set on using one of the web safe fonts, I would recommend testing various font-weights and seeing if one renders particularly well in most browsers. As the font weight correlates directly with the approximate size on screen this will affect the pixels being used and it is possible that some weights perform poorly in ClearType and related font smoothing technologies.
I would try finding an Arial lookalike otherwise.
I'm looking for some feedback on this issue, i'm using Sencha Touch 2.0 to build hybrid apps packaged via PhoneGap/Cordova.
I would love to use a font to embed symbols (& get rid of resolutions issues auto-magically). I just love http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/ for desktop & i'm wondering if it can fit in mobile apps as well.
However, I'm also trying to get the best possible perf.
Idea is to be able to use theses symbols on huge lists (>500 items). And i'm totally clueless on how theses methods (png vs. inlined-base64 vs. font) would compare.
Looks like Sencha team is using inlined-base64 over static pngs.
FontAwesome
I'm working on a project where we used to use FontAwesome and everything was working fine on iOS. But we had a big problem, it didn't work on Android and we didn't figure out how to solve this issue. So if you don't consider making your app for Android phones or if it happens to work fine for you, then I would suggest to go for it. With a webfont, like you said, you don't have to care about screen resolutions, you can change the colors and the size of the icons easily which I found quite convenient.
PNG
I guess the only problem with PNGs would be the number of HTTP request you make to get them. So the only advice I can give you is to use sprites. You could use something like Glyphicons which gives you icons pretty much like FontAwesome.
Inline Base64
The only problem with this solution is that images URIs must not be larger than 32k (according to When to consider base64 (DATA: URI) images?). It's apparently not supported by IE6/7 which I think is not an issue because Sencha only support webkit browser.
So, from my experience, go for FontAwesome if possible, otherwise sprites should always be the way to go for static images.
Hope it helped
I want to know does CSS behaviour changes with different operating system. My css is working bit different for vista and win xp proffesional for same version of browser. I was testing my application on vista + ie8 and xp + ie8. It worked bit different.
Officially the CSS behavior should not change when using the same browser on another operating system(for example FireFox 3 on Windows, MacOs or Linux). Calculations of width and floats are calculated by the browser and not by the OS. However there are some factors which which will cause the site to look a bit different in another OS.
One of the issues you are getting when using another OS (or even another machine) is Font support. If you use some fonts which are only available on Windows Platforms (or are normally only available when installing a certain application) the browser will use another font, this may cause some render differences. I can even imagine it is also possible that a font is a bit different in size in Linux compared to the same font in Windows).
Another issue you are getting are form elements (like textboxes and dropdowns). These are different for each OS and especially dropdown boxes may behave different in various operating systems (the pulldown part may vary in size and textboxes sometimes have a "3d" border and sometimes only a line). You will even notice these differences when switching in XP from the XP style (the blue/green/gray one) to the classic style (the old school gray version) the dropdownfields will be a different style (and if you are aligning them with other elements you will see the size change). But most of the times these differences are only a couple of pixels and are mostly not noticed by users, but for a designer/developer it can be a bit annoying.
What change did you see? There could be minor difference due to the OS theme - elements such as buttons, dropdowns, scrollbars could be styled/sized different.
You can observe some differences even if you change themes in XP (Classic vs XP look).
There are a few things that may change cross-platform:
Fonts
The Windows "core fonts", which are supposed to be cross-platform, are not on most default Linux installs. Also, 10pt in Firefox on my Ubuntu doesn't display the font at 13px like other browsers, it's slightly bigger. Some fonts may have a different line-height too I think.
Form widgets
Buttons, textboxes, textareas, fieldsets and dropdowns are different across browsers and platforms. Opera, for example, uses its own Vista-esque skinning of form controls and each skin is different. Chrome seems to use its own stuff too.
Screen resolution
If the design is fluid like Wikipedia you will end up with very long lines of text that may be difficult to read.
Hardware
The user's hardware may also cause changes in colours or other graphical anomalies.
CSS is platform independent. But, it is browser dependent. Different browsers may implement CSS differently but different platforms with same browser will not show any change. It will be better if you can post your CSS here, so that we can debug. Of course there may be minor differences in the elements because of the theme.
There are a lot of things that can differ from one system to another. There may be differences even between two systems with the same operating system and the same browser.
CSS in itself is an independend standard, and doesn't change. However all browsers doesn't interpret css the same, and the CSS standard doesn't cover every aspect of how the page should be rendered. Also, CSS covers how code that is correct should be interpreted, but if you have something that is incorrect in your code, it's up to each browser to try to interpret it best it can.
Especially text rendering can differ a lot, as there are many factors that control it. Things like the installed fonts, the smoothing algorithm chosen and the user size setting decide how the text is drawn. There are different versions of the same font, so for example Arial on XP and Vista doesn't have to render exactly the same, as details like kerning rules and font smoothing hinting can have been reworked.
Some page elements (like buttons, form fields and slider bars) can inherit their look and size from the operating system and the user settings in the system, so they may look different.
Yes. It may change.
Element styles may be differently rendered in different visual styles[themes] of the OS.
For eg:
In some themes there will be rounded corners for fieldset and in others it won't be rounded.
Problems I am facing in different operating systems are :
1. Text with fixed width is coming in two lines in vista whereas on xp it is coming in same line.
And one major problem I am facing is some part of my design is getting distorted in VISTA + IE8 which is rendering fine in XP + IE8. To make my application compatible with IE8 I have used
tag.