Re: [css-fonts-4] compat problem with 'system' generic font family?

Alan Stearns wrote:

> Except that I just did a vanilla install of Win10, and I have a
> ‘System’ font present. So I’m back to worrying again.

After other folks pinged me about this also, I did some more testing. The
problem font does indeed still ship with Windows, vgasys.fon. This is an
ancient FON format font. Modern versions of Firefox and Chrome using
DirectWrite ignore FON fonts but if GDI fallback rendering is used, the old
FON font will be picked up. Additionally, the latest versions of IE and
Edge match a font called 'system' and magically map it to Arial (go
figure...).

So, sad to say, I think we do indeed need to use something other than
"system" as the name of the system UI font generic font family.

How about 'system-ui'? It's simple and captures precisely what it's
intended to map to.

Cheers,

John

​

Received on Thursday, 12 November 2015 02:53:32 UTC