Re: [css3-fonts] Quoted font family names

Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd):
> Christoph Päper wrote:
> > one should never use ["roman"] in font (family) names.

Furthermore it really looks stupid to have a "Roman" font with  
Cyrillic, Arabic or whatnot characters in it.

> But if the typeface owner (e.g., Monotype) elects to call one of  
> their fonts "Times New Roman", then what is a mere user of CSS to do ?

That is a good question actually, the best values for 'font-family'  
are all but easy to figure out.

Example

   User 1 has 'Times' only.
   User 2 has 'Times New Roman' only.
   User 3 has 'Times New" and 'Times Old' (or 'Times Europa').
   User 4 has 'Times New' and 'CG Times'.
   User 5 has fonts called 'Times' and 'Times New Roman', the former
          being superior in typographic quality and character coverage.

What does everybody get for

   a) font-family: "Times";
   b) font-family: "Times New";
   c) font-family: "Times New Roman";
   d) font-family: "Times New Roman", "Times";
   e) font-family: "Times", "Times New Roman";

and, more importantly, what would a novice or naive author of CSS  
expect them to get? Without looking up the details, this is what I  
would assume:

           |  1      2      3      4      5
           |  T     TNR   TN,TO  TN,CGT T,TNR
  ---------+------+------+------+------+------
  a) T     |  T     TNR     TN    CGT?    T?
  b) TN    |  -     TNR     TN     TN    TNR
  c) TNR   |  -     TNR     -       -    TNR
  d) TNR,T |  T     TNR     TN?   CGT?   TNR
  e) T,TNR |  T     TNR     TN     TN?    T

So naively, as a CSS author one would tend to specify as little as  
possible and as a font author as much as possible.

Received on Monday, 10 August 2009 16:58:59 UTC