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Is there any standard that has a list of web-safe fonts
Is there a list of safe fonts for all browser and os?I use generally tahoma and there isn't any problem for windows but I don't know is there a problem about linux or mac
There's this page, I had it in my Firefox Scrapbook. It covers some of the most useful, widespread fonts and their closest equivalents. Yes it focuses on Windows and Mac. There's a linux/ubuntu/gnome screenshot of the font rendering down there: bottom of the page.
Be wary: this topic is controversial. From a pure design standpoint, the point is moot: there are no equivalent fonts. Never. Using core system fonts your mileage (and your ex width) will vary so wildly that most would simply advise you not to even start.
If you are serious about typesetting you should anyway be using fontsquirrel, google web fonts, or any other #font-face trick. With those, backward compatility will (sort of) be an issue, but not one that's typically considered relevant on linux. (those guys update like crazy)
There are some corner cases though, where I believe this approach is sensible. E.G. You could be searching for a very readable font, and prefer not having the user downloading it. Or you could be in love with some widespread commercial typeface, but can't/won't license it for a reason or the other. (e.g. I personally love the readability Palatino Linotype gives me on Windows)
A last word of warning: if you're targeting mobile devices this approach will drive you insane. Don't even start, or you'll expose your frail soul to the blows of the unmotivated horrors that inhabit Mobile Safari updates. Sanity can't last long under that kind of crossfire.
Short answer: no
There is no guarantee that any given browser / OS will support a specific font.
You can specify families of fonts from which the browser will select the first available font e.g.,
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
This is probably the closest you will get to what you want as it should at least select something of the desired style, if not the exact desired font.
You might take a look at Microsoft's Core fonts for the web project. These fonts are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux-based OSes (among others), but again there is no guarantee that these will be available on any given host.
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I am sorry if my question is a bit vague. I am trying to understand where to look for my problems. I have a regression test suite that captures and compare the screen. It seems like whenever we do some kind of library upgrade the regression tests would fail. Our font settings are the same. The difference would be like the graphics card upgrade (driver), window manager upgrade, or just third party library upgrade (for example Qt library). From human visual testing, the fonts look almost identical, but if I do pixel to pixel comparison, it would show that the snapshots are different. Does anyone have insight how the fonts are rendered ?
Graphics rendering on Linux is a proper mess. While Linux is about as old as Windows, Linux first tried to copy the old X11 window system. This was one of the oldest GUI systems in the world, and it shows - the API is beyond horrible. As a result, lots and lots of libraries were stacked on top of X11 to make it workable, with various degrees of compatibility.
To make things worse, X11 was not just a single implementation, there were competing X11 implementations. Linux chiefly used XFree86, which later became Xorg. And because that's not confusing enough, recent developments added a number of alternatives to X11, which support backwards-compatibility interfaces to X11. Some of those GUI libraries on top of X11 are aware of these new libraries, and may now use the new interfaces.
So, you basically have a pretty fragile system, and any library with a decent programming model has shaky foundations. It's no wonder that changing any part may suddenly cause re-rendering, possibly even choosing entirely new rendering paths.
Windows is a bit better, but it too is old and has some competing GUI libraries. The reason why it's better is probably threefold: there's a single party in control of all the interfaces (Microsoft), they were aware of the bad X11 design from the start (avoided beginner mistakes) and Microsoft has far more resources to spend.
But still, both Linux and Windows had to evolve to support Unicode and the much larger fonts it brought, 24 bits color, high-DPI screens, LCD screens with subpixel resolution, accelerated GPU's, etc. And it's been hard for both to dump old interfaces.
Back in 199[456] I was using Linux and a Matrox graphics adapter. For programming I often used the text mode and didn't bother to boot into X11. These graphics cards allowed for really high text resolutions and still had a very readable font. Occasionally I'd like to test if this font would work well for programming on X11 -- but I cannot find this font to give it a try!
I have searched intensively, for example here, but no font seems to look like the Matrox one. So, the questions:
which font was used? Was it the regular console font that just looked better on those graphic cards?
is this font available for X11? Which one is it?
Any examples / screenshots?
I'd be very glad if anyone could explain if I'm just hallucinating or if my memories are accurate.
UPDATE: I've since found a good resource. Selecting the font Px437_IBM_VGA_8x16.ttf and setting the terminal to 12px comes pretty close to my memories. Since monitor resolutions are much higher now, the font becomes pretty tiny, and scaling it up looks somewhat wrong. I will have to experiment.
This site dumps the ROMs of several old VGA BIOS chips and locates the bitmaps used by the character generator. There's a Matrox card from 1993 in there, but the fonts look quite ordinary to me.
What software or environment were you using, out of curiosity?
Also, have you made any progress on this subject on any other sites? I'm very curious as I'm going to be embarking on a highly relevant project at some point in the future.
I just found this font online -> http://webdraft.hu/fonts/classic-console/
maybe it will help.
Can anyone please help me understand what resources the system uses to render fonts on the browser? For e.g. graphics card, memory, etc. Sorry for this vague question but I am facing a problem here. We have a custom font which gets rendered differently in same versions of safari browsers in different systems. For instances, in some systems the fonts appears to be a bit bolder and due to that it is taking up more space to get displayed. All the systems have same resolution.
Safari uses Quartz to render fonts on OS X. I'm not sure what it uses on Windows but it seem it doesn't use Windows rendering engine for that. Quartz utilizes some of the graphic card resources but it's still mostly software rendering.
Quartz has a number of rasterization options that can influence font appearance. One of the most prominent is Font Smoozing. Here's an article about Font Smoothing on support forums. Though, I don't think it should change the amount of space rasterized text actually takes.
You may have problems with fonts themselves. Maybe, different systems have different versions of the font you use and that changes the way it looks. Or your font doesn't get loaded on some systems and Safari uses a fall back font. There may be many reasons. It's hard to tell what exactly causes your problems just from your description.
Just looking through the list of issues for the chromium project, a large number of them are cross-platform text rendering issues. Having to use the platform's text rendering system, and cater to their respective idiosyncrasies, I imagine is a lot of work.
Why not simply use the FreeType library and be done with it? FreeType is used in Linux, iOS and Android, among other platforms. So on these platforms, browsers are using a wrapped FreeType library anyway. Why not scrap that wrapping, scrap the platform-supplied rendering on Windows and Mac, and go pure FreeType?
The only answer that occurs to me is that perhaps it's to take advantage of the hardware accelerated composition and blending of glyphs that Windows- and Mac-supplied rendering offers.
Or my other answer is that perhaps it was because WebKit was ported before the subpixel antialiasing patents had expired, so the only way to get subpixel antialiased text was to use platform-supplied rendering.
Are either of these correct? If not, what is the case?
When Safari was ported to Windows, it came with a port of Apple text renderer. Popular opinion was that the text was blurry and illegible.
People get really, really used to how their system renders text and react very sensitively, and very annoyed indeed, to anything different.
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I heard from more than a single source that SVG is dying, it is abandoned by Adobe.
How sad! What's will be next alternative to SVG?
SVG is an open standard, developed by W3C. I really don't see it dying any time soon. Just because certain companies decide to drop its use for their commercial products (usually because they need, or feel they need, something more customised), it does not at all mean SVG will disappear on a more global scale.
At the moment, it's undoubtedly the most widely used vector graphics format on the web. Just take for example the images on Wikipedia - for almost all diagrams SVG is either used or there is a notice stating that it should be used. Many other open source projects endorse it in a similar way.
Now, the XAML markup language (part of WPF/Silverligtht) has been seen as a competitor to SVG by some, but truly they only overlap in functionality to a certain degree. (XAML supports lots of other things such as data binding, events, triggers, etc.) Indeed, the general use of XML is much restricted in that browsers don't natively support it (and can't properly, because of the fact that it's tightly bound to MS technologies). I would not even believe that it's strictly a direct competitor to SVG, nor that Microsoft have intended so.
To conclude, I don't think one can envisage SVG dying out until something clearly improved (and open-standard) comes along to replace it. As far as I know, there is nothing like that at the moment.
Check your sources.
A lot of people want SVG "dead". A common way of getting something to happend is by spreading rumours that it has already happend. It's called a self-fullfilling prophecy (wikipedia). Don't buy into it, and please don't actually help those wanting it dead by spreading the rumor further yourself.
Is SVG dead?
No, it has just begun.
What's next?
HTML5, Canvas and SVG in one long glorious love-affair. Get your first-row tickets now!
(Actually here's a youtube video of html5, canvas and svg showing off the infinite resolution inherent in vector graphics. Somewhat lame but real, unlike rumors.)
SVG (Viewer) was abandoned by Adobe ages ago since most browsers support it natively.
Only IE is holding back the technology by not having native support.
Update: IE9 will have both native SVG support and native Canvas support! (Vista and above only though)
If you'd like to show your support for getting IE to support it natively add your vote and comments to these bugs.
https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/SearchResults.aspx?SearchQuery=SVG
Bring back VML! Just kidding ;) I don't think SVG is dying, but <canvas>'s adoption for HTML5 seems like the way things are going on the web.
I'd like to add my support for SVG. First, I believe that it is widely used in mobile technology though this is through conversations about 2 years ago rather than seeing code. It was one for the first languages developed by W3C to be used over-the-web and has been consistently supported for the last 10 years. I initially thought it would be a killer-app in 1998 and said so, especially since Adobe then had enthusiastic support.
Because SVG is a full XML dialect it can be easily mixed with other XML applications such as XHTML and MathML. It's possible to include XML information in SVG elements so that documents can be fully semantic (i.e. carry a data-meaning as well as a graphical one).
SVG is effectively feature-complete for a 2-D graphics language. There is no technical reason to invent anything else. It does high-quality rendering, animation and can support interaction through its own elements or through Javascript. It is therefore unlikely that major web software manufacturers will NEED to invent anything else.
The main problem is not that SVG is "dying" - it is not - but that it takes a long time for the various companies to converge. When they do I would expect SVG to emerge as a consensus.
Part of the problem is that graphics are not yet seen as a semantic problem - it's often "easier" to inflict a dumb animation on a client than to set up the infrastructure to send semantics over the web and repurpose at the client. But as the semantic web develops then standards such as SVG will be increasingly important. If, for example, you wish to mash-up geographical information then either you use a properietary solution such as GoogleMaps, or you look for a shared standard approach. You can never count on free proprietary solutions in the long run.
Note also that in many areas which receive public funding there is an increasing drive towards Open standards and this is another reason why SVG is well positioned.
Then there's this article posted Friday on Network World, titled EC decision expected to force IE to better support standards. In it, Håkon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO, states
Second, due to the increased competition stemming from the ballot box, browsers will improve their support for standards. This will result in a richer, faster web. For example, I believe that Microsoft's IE will add support for SVG, a standard that all browsers but IE support.
Of course, it's in his best interest to see IE falling in line, but behind, his browser. He gets to be cutting edge, but part of a larger 'standards' crowd.
While this is an question was asked before high res/ retina displays came to be the normal for mobile devices. SVG is having a big come back as vector graphics solves DPI issues on the web. You will be seeing more SVG on the web than before.
Even apple.com menu is svg now days!