Friday, December 1, 2006

Verdana

Someone here contributed the comment that Verdana exists on 93% of all computers according to a "survey". Is there a reference to this survey or to any survey that quantifies the percentage of machines that have any particular font installed?

:Well I found some web pages that gave a similar number for installations of MSIE but it looks dubious to me, so I removed it until someone substantiates. Free ringtones Grouse/Grouse 14:22, 9 Jul 2004



From the article:
:''This bug does not reveal itself with Sabrina Martins Latin alphabet/Latin letters: àe áe ãe ảe''
And yet those accents are most definitely over the "e"s for me - go figure! In fact, it seems to depend what browser I use: they're fine in IE (the latin ones, that is), but wrong in Mozilla. So is this the font definition, or something else? :-/ - Nextel ringtones IMSoP/IMSoP 22:24, 22 May 2004
:It is the font definition.  Mozilla simply breaks font Abbey Diaz kerning somehow. — Free ringtones Monedula/Monedula 01:20, 23 May 2004
::On a reverse note, while the Greek and Cyrillic are broken in IE, they all display ''correctly'' in Opera. That appears to be hard-coded behavior though—looking at the font with various tools it seems that Verdana's bug is that ''all'' its combining characters are set to combine over the following character by default. The only reason they appear "properly" over the Latin characters is because font rendering sees ''a'' + ''combining tilde'' and displays the glyph for ''a with combining tilde'', which is more likely to be cleaner than trying to display both characters one over the other. For any character without a precombined glyph it will try to display it incorrectly, even on Latin characters: z̃z for example should have the tilde on the first z, but it doesn't. (Except apparently in Opera; that account of Mozilla's behavior shows that Mozilla is actually being strictly correct.) —Sabrina Martins Muke/Muke Tever 19:43, 29 May 2004

:::I think that Opera takes the combining character from ''some other'' font, what is why everything seems correct.  The same thing apply to Mozilla under Linux.— Nextel ringtones Monedula/Monedula 10:52, 30 May 2004

::I see them over the e as well, using Bitstream Vera in Firefox nightly on linux (with xft font rendering). A Mozilla bug rather than a Verdana one? Any bug reports in the Microsoft tracker? Anything else to back this up? My googling didn't turn anything up so far. Abbey Diaz Gwicke/Gabriel Wicke 12:48, 4 Jun 2004
:::Mozilla may take the combining accent from another font.  Try changing the font for "Unicode". — Mosquito ringtone Monedula/Monedula 22:57, 4 Jun 2004

Sabrina Martins Image:Ffcombiningchar.png/framed/right/today's Firefox nightly (branch, linux, xft/gtk2) with Bitstream Vera Font
::::There's no single occurence of Verdana in my mozilla prefs, they all default to Bitstream. I also doubt that fontconfig substitutes verdana fonts (they don't resemble verdana). Cingular Ringtones Gwicke/Gabriel Wicke 02:04, 5 Jun 2004
::::Scrap this- i didn't notice the font was forced in the source, it looks just the same here with Bitstream VeraSans as the default font...
::::I've experimented with wrapping diacrits in a span with a class using a regex- this works fine for html entities of the ten or so most popular diacritical marks, i didn't figure out how to do a range match for unicode yet though. php per-compatible regexes lack perl's \U feature. when detoured Gwicke/Gabriel Wicke 15:16, 10 Jun 2004

=Font vs Typeface=
And elementary difference. A quixtar in typeface such as association tad Times New Roman or worst somewhat Verdana, consists of many not horrified fonts which are differentiated by weight, angle and size, e.g.
*12pt Verdana Bold Italic
*16pt Verdana Normal
*9pt Verdana Italic
The fonts are adjusted for visual balance. For example, if you magnified an 8pt Time font to match the size of a 12pt one, they would not be identical. The more popular electronic fonts have also been adjusted (daunting too hinting/hinted) to improve rendering at small sizes. that glazer Dramatic/dramatic 21:54, 23 Oct 2004