Re: font-size and accents, again

Todd Fahrner wrote:
> 
> At 8:57 AM -0800 11/19/99, Erik van der Poel wrote:
> >
> >Basically, you're saying that people ought to try several different
> >values of line-height on several platforms, perhaps both on screen and
> >paper, before deciding what value to put in their style sheet. Too
> >little leading is bad, and too much leading is bad too. You need to find
> >the right value.
> 
> Er, sure. But I'm puzzled by the part about "several platforms".
> Seems to me that the issue is "several fonts". Are you saying that
> different platforms report/produce different font sizes when
> processing identical font data?

I'm not sure whether different platforms give different results with the
same font data. What I meant was that document authors will probably
want to try their documents on various browsers and various platforms,
just to make sure it's OK. (Some authors may not bother with this, and
just try IE and Netscape on Windows 95.)

I think it's also necessary for browser vendors to try a single document
on various platforms, to make sure all of those versions give similar
results.

> Of
> course, this is more art than science, so too much talk of algorithms
> is likely to offend some practitioners as vain.

Yes, I understand. But as an implementor, I need a clear spec. One of
the goals of asking all these questions on this list is to get the spec
authors to update their spec with clarifications. Another goal is to get
Mozilla to pass the various CSS tests, including David Baron's. If it
turns out that Baron's tests are invalid, though, we need to get them
fixed.

> [1] "The font size refers to the size of the font from baseline to
> baseline, when set solid (in CSS terms, this is when the 'font-size'
> and 'line-height' properties have the same value)."

Maybe this definition needs to be clarified, so that people like myself
won't be so confused and won't take up so much bandwidth on this mailing
list.

How about adding some wording like this:

  The font size corresponds to the "em square", a concept used by
  typography experts. Note that certain glyphs may bleed outside
  their em squares.

Erik

Received on Friday, 19 November 1999 13:38:19 UTC