Fonts in browsers
 

I'm running Red Hat 9 and KDE.

ON Konqueror this page shows up in all courier I believe. Any way some serifed font.

On Mozilla 1.4 the text shows up as all Ariel.

The code specifies

Left cell is Helvetica, Arial, sans
Middle is Arial, Helvetica, sans
Right is Verdana, Arial, sans

???

What are the font rules on Linux boxes? Do other flavors of UNIX act similarly (yes I know OSX is going to be different). Sun? BSD? AIX?
SGI UNIX?

My client deals with biotech companies who, I would think have a lot of UNIX boxes lying around their offices.

I'm going to boot into Gnome now to see what gives over there.

Same thing in Gnome/Mozilla
 

Arial in Gnome Mozilla.

Sorry I forgot the URL here it is:

http://www.alogical.com/gzpproto/

Verdana shows up as Verdana in the far right cell, the other two as Arial (I believe).

Now, there are a couple of things to consider when it comes to fonts on Unixes. First - XWindows handles the fonts. The underlying OS doesn't handle fonts at all, and nowadays XFree86 is the most common incarnation of XWindows, even on several commercial Unices.

Rendering anti-aliased fonts are only done with TTF fonts I believe. So if you check what fonts are available to, say, a GTK2 application, you might notice that some fonts that you know are available on the system isn't available to the application you're using. I think this is what's happening.

I don't have a truetype Helvetica font, so in the first cell my browser ("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20030929 Firebird/0.7+ "if you're curious like web developers are ;)) proceeds to the next entry which is Arial. Next cell is Arial, so Arial is displayed there. Third cell is Verdana, which also is installed as a TT font, so it's available and gets correctly displayed.

Btw, font sizes can vary wildly between different platforms when it comes to rendering web pages, so I suggest you use CSS more. :)


hw