Re: Font bug in IE 5.5

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000 13:32:22 -0400, pdf@bizfon.com wrote:

>I apologize in advance for posting this to the list, but I don't know where to
>look for info on this.
>IE 5.5 seems to display fonts as symbols in some cases.  The case I saw had a
>span using an ID and the ID had this style:

IE had problems with generic fonts all the way back to IE4 in fact. I'm
not surprised to hear that it's still there.

There are a few pointers and screen shots about it here.

  http://css.nu/pointers/bugs.html

>font-family: serif,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

This is exactly what seems to trigger this bug.
In this rule the initial generic font serif will be selected directly
since generic fonts are always valid.

Now IE is supposed to pick the default serif font that the user has
configured locally and this sometimes goes wrong.

It has in one case been noted that if IE is locally configured to use
Times New Roman as its default font, it will fall back to use one of the
old bit-mapped fonts (MS Serif) instead, for a style rule like this.

  font-family: serif;

The cure is unreliable in a way.

1) Don't specify a font-family at all. (seems to work best)

2) Keep at least one font name in the list that has a high
   probability to exist on the client side (e.g. Arial or
   Times New Roman) and put that name next to last in the list
   just before the last generic name. This method is not 100%
   reliable in a www environment of course.

-- 
Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
<URL:http://member.newsguy.com/%7Ejrexon/>

Received on Friday, 13 October 2000 13:44:48 UTC