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

since we don't have an automatic notification system in place yet, and 
since the discussion is beginning to assume some momentum, i thought i'd 
send one manually to the list:

r12a has created an 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?

See https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/126

Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2016 15:58:33 UTC