[WEB4LIB] determining font displayed with generic font family

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Long" <bob at esrl.lib.md.us>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 11:58 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] determining font displayed with generic font family


> Hi. Does anyone know how a browser determines which font to display when
> presented with a generic family in a style sheet?

Depends entirely on the browser.

>
> I finally got around to upgrading to IE 5.5 and now all of the pages on
> our site (with style, font-family: sans-serif) are displaying in
> Trebuchet MS. The previous version of IE didn't do this. The web-page
font
> is set to Times New Roman, so that doesn't seem to have any bearing on
it.
>

The answer you don't want to hear: I've seen this problem posted
repeatedly on Microsoft's IE newsgroups and
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, and have never seen a
solution.  I've never seen a regedit hack that fixes this, which strikes
me as the obvious place to start.

This is a recurring problem with upgrades to IE 5.5; the CSS serif and
sans-serif font families start defaulting to a strange, if not wholly
whacked, choice.  For me, 5.5 started using Lucida Sans Unicode as my sans
font on NT4; for others, it starts using a symbol font (so consider
yourself lucky!).  Mine only went back to Arial when I upgraded my OS to
Win2000.  I suspect that's not the solution you're really looking for.
:->

If the page is under your control, you probably want a bug fix of
"font-family: Arial, sans-serif"; if not, alert the page author to the
fact that this is a known IE5.5 bug which may be making their pages hard
or impossible to read for a non-negligible percentage of users.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu