[Wylug-help] More html advice, please

[Smylers]

Aaron Crane writes:

> 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;

Erm, apparently I can't type "Arial",.

> 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

Fair enough.  After sending the above I also remembered about Liberation
Sans, which should be a better drop-in replacement for Arial, given that
Red Hat created it explicitly for that purpose.  (I forgot about it
because I use Ubuntu, and Debian object to Red Hat's fiddling with the
GPL in licensing the Licensing fonts.  But it looks like they will be in
the next Ubuntu release.)

However, at least some Liberation Fonts packages include magic which
silently uses Liberation Sans when a document requests Arial (and
similarly for the Courier New and Times New Roman replacements), so
possibly it isn't necessary to mention them.

> Also, unlike Arial, the metrics of FreeSans aren't the same as those
> of Helvetica, so it's not a drop-in replacement.

The point isn't to have a drop-in replacement, but a 'second-choice'
typeface if the preferred one isn't available.  If you don't mention it
and neither Helvetica nor Arial are available then your document is
going to have an arbitrary sans font, which could have any metrics at
all.

But what you say may be a good reason to put Arial before FreeSans in
the list.

Smylers