This might be really picky, but a person in QA pointed out to me that sub-bullets are tiny when using Verdana in IE: http://jsbin.com/IQEmEq/2
The first list is using the default browser style, the second list is using Verdana. Notice the sub-bullet in the first list has a normal size, i.e. it is the same size as the other bullets in the list. But in the second list the sub-bullet is smaller than the other bullets.
Chrome and Firefox seem to render all the bullets the same size regardless of font, but IE for some reason doesn't.
How can I "fix" this?
This seems to be something they introduced in IE 9: the bullets may depend on the font. As far as I can see, the sub-bullets are the same size in both lists, but in the Verdana list, they look smaller, partly because the primary bullets are big, partly because Verdana test is big.
I guess Microsoft regards this as a “fix” to something. It seems that they use U+25E6 WHITE BULLET as the default secondary bullet, and it is oddly small in Verdana (when compared to other characters). Previously, I suppose, IE used bullets taken from a specific font, no matter what had been set in CSS.
So in a sense, it’s design flaw in the Verdana font.
One way (though not the most elegant way) to get list bullets you want is to include them into document content, without using ul markup. You can get a basic bullet using • and a secondary bullet (ring) using ∘ if you want a bigger circle in Verdana. (U+2218 is RING OPERATOR, so it’s a somewhat illogical choice.)
In fact they introduced the behavior in IE8 already. For me it's just the contrary: when the LI's font is Arial, the bullets are smaller, even rectangular, and with Verdana they're of regular size.
If you want to fix lists in many documents you can use either css or javascript that will fix the lists when the page loads.
I am using a famous japanese font called "Meiryo" for on a japanese website. However, the usage of this font causes all my input fields to stretch. It is a very strange bug, if i replace the font by anything else, all my input fields get back to normal.
Anybody can explain me why this bug occurs please?
Tested on all major browsers
It’s not a bug. An <input type=text> element has its visible size set by the size attribute (defaulted to 20), which sets the width in “characters”. This means “average width” characters according to HTML 4, whereas HTML5 drafts say that “the user agent should ensure that at least that many characters are visible”. The reality varies across browsers. In any case, the visible width of the element should depend and actually depends on the properties of the font – on the widths of glyphs in it.
The following simple test (which assumes some common default font to be used for input) illustrates this:
<input value="Hello world"><br>
<input value="Hello world" style="font-family: Meiryo">
The latter element is considerably wider, and by looking at the appearance of the initial text, set you can see the reason to that: in Meiryo, characters (glyphs) are generally wider than in fonts commonly used as default input fonts.
The conclusions depend on the page design and layout. In flexible design, the details of layout adapt to the requirements of data and fonts, rather than the other way around. If the design is more rigid, you might consider setting an upper limit on the width in CSS, using pixels if you really must, e.g. max-width: 200px.
it's font issue
use CSS width and height property to solve the problem
It seems that all fonts have some sort of embedded padding or margin. By setting:
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
You never get what you want. Does anybody know why this is?
It sounds like the issue you are having is not with the CSS but the font itself. Most fonts define a baseline, x-height and line-height out-of-the-box. Your specific issue is likely with the font's leading, the space between lines. Sometimes these values can be wildly inconsistent. If you are really trying to get a specific font to line up correctly, I would recommend taking a look at FontLab and editing the glyphs/baseline/line-height for the specific font you are working with.
You can also look at a web-safe version of the font. These types of fonts usually have been specifically spaced to render best on the web. This isn't always the case, but it might get you the results you are looking for. Check out Google's library of web fonts here.
Update
This answer has received enough attention that I decided to add the first comment below to the answer and expound on it.
Browser Reset: Every browser will set default states for many of the reserved HTML tags like a and strong. There are other things defined by default including fonts, line-heights, weights and sizes. This could have an affect on the rendering of a font. Generally this is localized to specific browsers. So, by using a CSS reset, you can eliminate default rendering issues in browsers. Eric Meyers Reset is a good reset, but there are definitely others. Try using different ones to see which works best for you.
However, CSS resets work by targeting all browsers and setting them to all be the same. Some people prefer to use something that, instead, targets only the issues with each browser. That is were Normalize will be better.
There are also issues that a CSS reset will not fix. Such as font aliasing (making the fonts seem smooth rather than jagged). Since some browsers and operating systems do not add anti-aliasing to fonts, you will also see glyph width differences. This, unfortunately, is unavoidable in most cases. Some people go the route of using a flash font replacement tool like Cufon or Sifr. This too has it's own list of issues (such as the FOUC).
Another Update
One other issue that is still out there is the problem with kerning, or the space between glyphs. There is a CSS property letter-spacing that will allow you to do a global kern on a block of text, but it lacks the ability to target individual glyphs like Photoshop or InDesign. The kerning is also based on whole-pixels, so you are limited by what you can achieve. It also has issues with IE and is not as reliable as one would hope. There is a javascript called kerningjs that is pretty decent but it, too, is whole-pixel based and therefore not as accurate as rasterized text.
On the whole, fonts on the web have gotten better over the past few years. Sadly, we are still dealing with issues from the past, when fonts were only intended to be printed or rasterized. There is hope on the horizon for us font enthusiasts, though. As #allcaps said, the CSS3 specification for linebox is out there, so it's only a matter of time until it is widely accepted!
The reasons of this pecularity of the computer fonts are mostly historical. In the past, fonts were the sets of small metal blocks with one character on each, and the height of these blocks had to be enough to contain all the elements of any character, including descendants, ascendants and diacritical marks. The typographic tradition has defined the font size as the height of such metal blocks. That's why almost all actual characters are usually much smaller visually than the font size set for the text and there is some white space above and below them.
Here is a good article explaining the historical roots of the main typographic measurements: http://www.dev-archive.net/articles/typograph1-en.html#Ch22
x ov gjqpy bdfhklt CAPS ÂÊÁËÈ
A glyph is designed on a two dimensional canvas. For the latin writing system the height of this canvas is consistent and width may vary. Glyphs are placed on a baseline. x is on the baseline and the top of x defines x-height. Round and pointy shapes appear smaller so are optically corrected. Descenders extend below the baseline. Ascenders, capitals go above x-height. Browsers align text with different fonts (in the same paragraph) by baseline.
So why is the build in margin? Glyphs need whitespace around to be aligned to each other.
What can we do to influence these margins?
Choose your fonts wisely.
Specify line-height p { line-height:0.5EM;}.
Baseline shift .shift { top:-.5em; position:relative; }
And wait for CSS3 module: line.
General advice: do not adjust a font yourself unless you are absolutely sure what you are doing. One of the many things you'll encounter is hinting. Windows needs hinted fonts and hinting is hard to get right. Also the way fonts are loaded (#font-face) will load a local copy if it exists. You can disable local fonts by a hack. Your mileage may vary.
you can use line-height and letter-spacing padding/margin in fonts...
otherwise use custom css for each heading........
/*use line-height*/
.font{
line-height: 1px;
letter-spacing: 1px;
}
or use custom css......
h1{margin:1px 0;}
h2{margin:1px 0;}
h3{margin:1px 0;}
h4{margin:1px 0;}
using these css before use reset css .......
The "padding" at the top and bottom of fonts is essentially reserved space for diacritics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic). Some scripts stack multiple diacritics on some letters, including capitals (for example, Vietnamese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet) so a font designer that forgets to reserve some place for them won't be able to extend his font later. Also, horizontal scripts require some separation (leading) between lines to be readable.
Only very specific glyphs like box drawing elements extend to the limits of a glyph box
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2500.pdf
That's also why the "padding" is built-in each glyph. If it was an external property it would not be possible to differentiate between glyphs intended to be jointive and glyphs that need some separation (in other words the amount of padding is a glyph property no a whole-font property).
The following example requires a good font with decent Unicode coverage (http://dejavu-fonts.org/ works)
Jointive box drawing elements
↓
┃ÇŖŞ
┃ẤỄǛȰ┃U ← You really need to include the "padding" to align with box drawings
↑
Latin capitals with multiple diacritics (really crowded)
Lastly fonts stem from very old technology (movable type), and the conventions used to describe them still refer to fifteenth century habits, which makes them quite un-obvious to laymen.
(See also http://www.webfonts.info/node/330 for info on complications added by computer font formats)
fonts opentype text-rendering
If you want use space between lines in a paragraph, you can use:
line-height: 3px; /*3px is an example*/
Or, if you use space between letters, you can use:
letter-spacing: -2px;
Its not a problem with the font as such. Yes, as #matthew said, the font design itself has some character built in. For example, check out difference between say "Segoe" family and "Verdana" family. You will keep on resetting your css if you need to use both. One style just won't work.
The larger part of the problem lies in the way different browsers render even on the same OS. Heck, even different versions of IE render differently. ClearType, Anti-aliasing, font smoothing, software rendering instead of GPU rendering, rendering engine itself, etc. etc. all play their role to make sure you don't end up with pixel-perfect design across all browsers across all OSs.
ClearType tries to align with pixel-grid causing another set of problems with subtle differences in height.
This link is very old, but still very relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
See Also: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-rendering.html
See Also: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/9972/how-can-i-make-fonts-render-the-same-way-across-different-web-browsers
See Also: CSS font differences between browsers
Your best bet would be to keep tinkering with css until you get close enough.
The native margins for text elements are as follows (at least in Firefox and Chrome):
Working Example
p{margin:16px 0;}
h1{margin:21px 0;}
h2{margin:19px 0;}
h3{margin:18px 0;}
h4{margin:21px 0;}
h5{margin:22px 0;}
h5{margin:24px 0;}
To remove them you'll have to re-set the margin like so:
p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6{margin:0;}
After looking at the html source of a html document found out that after the normal margin/padding added by all the browsers, chrome by default adds its own webkit's margin/padding properties.
-webkit-margin-before: 1em;
-webkit-margin-after: 1em;
-webkit-margin-start: 0px;
-webkit-margin-end: 0px;
Solution is instead of normal
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
Append the style with
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
-webkit-margin-before:0;
-webkit-margin-after:0;
}
As -webkit-margin-start and -webkit-margin-end are already set to 0px, there is no use of setting them in here.
Tell me if that works! :)
I think is kerning what you intend to describe
take a look to this library
http://kerningjs.com/
CSS, meet kerning. Kerning, meet CSS. Kern, style, transform, and
scale your web type with real CSS rules, automatically.
Print designers have had it easy for way too long. This is 2012; the
web has been around for over two decades, yet web designers don’t get
full control over their typography? Forget that, use Kerning.js!
it's free
The fonts itself has problems it seems. CSS can be used as shown above to solve the problem but still it should be said that it is better in your scenario to fix up the font files itself.
Check out this page as it will give you better insight on how to edit a font:
http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/free-font-creation-tools/
Here is my Opinion
The margin is the distance from each side to the neighboring element and the margin property can be set for the top, left, right and bottom of an element
padding is the distance between the border of an HTML element and the content within it.
But in your case you dont really need these both you , as you are interested in font spacing , there is one css property called letter-spacing
The letter-spacing property increases or decreases the space between characters in a text
Try
h2 {letter-spacing:-3px}
The letter-spacing property is supported in all major browsers.
Note: The value "inherit" is not supported in IE7 and earlier. IE8 requires a !DOCTYPE. IE9 supports "inherit".
I often run into the same issue, especially when trying to get text to top-align with something beside it that isn't text, such as an image.
Here's a technique I've had some success with. Select a portion of the text so that a colored background appears behind it. The top of the selection highlight will reveal what the font considers the "top" and "bottom" of the letter. Take screenshots of the font at various sizes and across multiple browsers. Zoom in on the screen capture in Photoshop and count the number of pixels from what you believe "should" be the top and the actual top. Calculate the percentage that number of pixels represents within the entire selection height.
Then set a negative top margin on the text in ems that is equal to the percentage of the "overflow." So if the text should be 10px tall and it's actually 12px tall, then give it a negative top margin of -0.2em.
Then wherever you assign the font-family that's causing the problem, also include this negative top margin as well. You can use the same technique for bottom and side overflow as well, but I typically find it's the top that causes the biggest headaches.
What's about resetting the margin and padding value to zero in all
*{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
I have run into this pain a couple of times when using some webfonts for icons and gained better control by placing them in an absolute positioned container.
HTML
<div class="relative">
<div class="webfont">✔</div>
</div>
CSS
.relative { position:relative; }
.webfont { position: absolute;
top: -5px;
left: -5px; /* easier control with these values */
}
This felt like a better way to control things cross browser, rather than say, using positive/negative margins and paddings.
Giving the text block a container and class we have much more cleaner ability to tweak it's position cross browser. ( IMO ).
Might be something there.
Cheers,
Rob
You can do it with line-height
I know it's not too common in HTML5, and is more HTML4.1, but...
<font style="line-height: 5px;">
and if it's really that important:
<font style="padding: 5px;">L</font>
<font style="padding: 5px;">o/font>
<font style="padding: 5px;">r</font>
<font style="padding: 5px;">e</font>
<font style="padding: 5px;">m</font>
JS Fiddle Link http://jsfiddle.net/Xfvpu/1/
Okay so I have a document with xhtml doctype and I use the proper br / tag
but for some reason the gap between two images renders differently in Firefox than it does every other browser.
The page is can be found at http://www.safaviehhome.com/Rugs/Area-Rugs.html
the CSS is all mixed up unfortunately so I can't explicitly post it, but the two images are within a DIV wrapper, and the images themselves are not in seperate divs. They both have image maps, and the size between the two images width only differ by around 20px.
In between the two images are two br /
tags, I tried fiddling around in Firebug but could not figure it out .. And I won't be happy until I figure this out .. it's pissing me off! :)
The difference between other browsers and Firefox is around a 10px difference .. Firefox adds extra spacing .. I'm not asking for any help specifically, just wanted to see if there is some rendering issues I'm not aware of so I can put this issue to rest.
Look in other browsers vs Firefox to see what I mean .. I would really appreciate some help I need to figure this out for my own knowledge.
You cannot rely on using <br/> for vertical spacing. You need to use styles, such as
<div style="margin-top:5px">image goes here</div>
Or even:
<img style="margin-top:5px" src="yourimg.jpg" />
In my experience browsers are sufficiently consistent if you use this approach.
Edited to add:
But (and I can't stress this strongly enough): browsers will never be entirely consistent. Designs which assume that 100% consistency is possible will fail. (If this seems harsh, try getting through one day using only your smartphone's browser. Yuck.)
While I do not know the exact reason why Firefox acts like it does, I can offer an advice. From my experience using br tags for layout are, er, not the wisest idea, since you easily lose control of the exact spacing it creates. Like in this case, where it seems that Firefox intreprets two br tags as two lines, whereas at least Opera take the first one as a line break after the map and the second one creates this empty space.
You didn't ask for a workaround, but I can't resist: take a look at br-less alternative.
I need to make buttons and boxes on a web page to meet a client's design spec. There are lots of buttons and boxes with rounded edges and shadows and such, and unfortunately I have to support old lame browsers.
I've seen many ways of dealing with these. Since it will vary in size (height and width of the items must fit the contents), I can't use a fixed graphic. The approaches I've seen are:
1) use a table, with 9 cells. Use a background image on each of the 4 corner and 4 edge cells.
2) use 4 creatively nested divs. Use a single background image, bigger than any of the boxes will be in height and width, using css to position them in the corners. Something like this:
<div class="boxDecorationBL">
<div class="boxDecorationTL">
<div class="boxDecorationTR">
</div>
</div>
<div class="boxDecorationBR">
<div class="content">
Loren ipsum dolor amet!
</div>
</div>
</div>
and then stuff like this in the css:
boxDecorationBL {
background: transparent url(boxdecoration.gif) no-repeat bottom left;
}
Both are ugly in my opinion (I wish I could just use a single div rather than cluttering the markup with that sort of junk), and I'm concerned the latter won't work right with alpha channel images, since they overlay each other.
Are there other, better, ways that enlightened developers use?
(I have considered solutions such as doing it with css3 -- everything I've needed can be done without images in that case -- and then using javascript to accomodate older browsers by plucking out elements and replacing them with more complex structures, such as one of those above. I like that for the fact that the markup stays cleaner.)
While this is something I'm lucky enough to not have to attempt, as a hobbyist rather than professional1, it appears that CSS 3 Pie2 can enable many CSS 3 effects in Internet Explorer, albeit not without some problems3. It should, however, reduce the inordinate amount of work required to enable the apparently-required cross-browser pixel-perfection.
It's worth noting that, if you're able to include CSS3 Pie, it might be worth considering html5shim4, to enable the use of html5 elements in your designs and layout.
Similarly, Rahpaël5 could be used for any requirement for SVG graphics, but this seems even further outside the scope of your question.
Finally, as an addenda, I've heard some good things about Modernizr6, which, according to their home page, is:
...a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.
My inclination, however, is as noted in my comment: effect the appearance in the modern browsers (IE9 and 8, so far as possible, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera...) and then make the point that supporting IE <8 requires a lot more work, and greater time.
Make an approximate, and reasonable, quote that would represent the cost in terms of your time, and the cost of that time to your clients/employers. Once you've given them the quote, ask if they're willing to accept the essential cross-browser differences, or whether they're willing to pay for the additional time.
Footnotes:
Or possibly unlucky, since I don't have a job doing something I quite like doing...
CSS 3 Pie.
Questions tagged with [tag:internet-explorer] and [tag:css3] here on Stack Overflow.
html5shim.
Rahpaël JS.
Modernizr.
make it with good graphic for the modern borwsers and for people who use old browser just show a message like "please use another modern browser" ( is easy to check browser with php ), or just use another css for old browsers, this will save you a lot of time