[csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] Specifying changes to parameters for fallback fonts

r12a has just created a new issue for 
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts:

== [css-fonts] Specifying changes to parameters for fallback fonts ==
After another session of fruitless wrestling with fonts, i thought i 
should make sure (a) i'm not missing something obvious, and (b) if 
not, ask whether we can improve CSS.

This time i was trying to get a particular look across Mac- and 
Windows-based browsers. On the Mac i like the look of Helvetica Neue 
with font-weight set to 300 at a font size of 16px.  But i can't find 
anything to match that in Windows standard fonts – well, i could get 
reasonably close, but i'd need to be able to change the font weight 
and the font size for a font-family name specified as a fallback.

I've never understood why, in CSS, i can't say something like 

p { font: 'macfont' 300 16px, 'windowsfont' 500 18px, sans-serif  }

This is a much bigger problem in non-Latin scripts, where glyph 
dimensions can vary widely from font to font at the same font-size.  
For example, compare the same glyphs set to the exact same font-size 
in Mongolian Baiti and Noto Sans Mongolian:

![screen shot 2016-05-18 at 16 45 
32](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/4839211/15365391/03a38354-1d18-11e6-82cf-0db2412a3bb0.png)

It's not just mongolian, this is a constant problem in arabic, and 
many other scripts.

And by the way, i thought about web fonts, but i can't help thinking 
that you should be able to just use standard platform fonts if you 
want to.  Note that that tweaking the size/weight of such fonts would 
be easier than finding fonts that look good and can be used for free 
to cover the up to 15 languages we have on the i18n site, but also 
we're often dealing with multiple languages on a given page for 
examples etc, which also ramps up the bandwidth when using webfonts.

What am i missing?

Please view or discuss this issue at 
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/126 using your GitHub 
account

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2016 15:58:56 UTC