Sent by Marko Karppinen on 11 July 2002 05:05
on 11.7.2002 11:06, Mark Gallagher at [EMAIL-REMOVED] wrote:
> FWIW, you should probably place "Helvetica" before Arial, as many
> UNIX(ish) and Mac OSes have Arial *and* Helvetica installed. As
> Helvetica is a more attractive font to begin with (not to mention that
> many Linux boxes have crappy Arial fonts), it's probably better if they
> see Helvetica instead of Arial.
I disagree with this. The single most important thing affecting quality of
font output is whether or not a bitmap or TrueType hints are available for
the specified font size.
If your site uses 11px Arial, then any Arial on any platform is likely to
reproduce that with some success. But if your Unix viewers switch to a 14px
Helvetica bitmap and then forcefully scale it down to 11px, the result is
likely to be very, very bad.
None of this applies if you leave font size alone, of course.
mk
