[Wylug-help] More html advice, please

[Aaron Crane]

Smylers writes:
> At least some Linux systems appear to come with a Helvetica clone
> called FreeSans Medium, so I'd throw that in there too:
> 
>   font-family: Helvetica, "FreeSans Medium", Aria, sans-serif;

I've considered doing that on a large website of my acquaintance, and
I eventually decided against it, on the grounds that, while FreeSans
works excellently at large pixel sizes, it has some problems at sizes
typically used on web pages:

  - "Jiggly" perceived x-heights at very small sizes

  - Awkwardly-positioned, blurry horizontal strokes in some letters
    (like the cross bars of "T", "E", "B", "e", "f", and the tail of
    "t"), reducing letterform accuracy, and causing inconsistent page
    greyness

  - Uneven and excessively-wide letter spacing, especially in bold
    text

Also, unlike Arial, the metrics of FreeSans aren't the same as those
of Helvetica, so it's not a drop-in replacement.  In particular, it
needs deeper leading than either Helvetica or Arial for the same
visual appearance, otherwise lines appear squashed together.  That's
not a problem for some purposes, but it makes it tricky to write a
single CSS stylesheet which will work regardless of whether the system
has FreeSans.

However, I have hopes that some or all of these problems will be fixed
in future.  And it's worth pointing out that the problems may in some
cases be caused by the font renderer rather than the font itself, so
perhaps a software upgrade would be enough to fix them.

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/