IE9: wrong rendering of Arial (bolder) - html

I've tested my page in Chrome, FF and IE8 and all the browser render the text this way:
It is defined like:
font-family: 'Arial', sans-serif;
font-size: 0.75em;
font-weight: bold;
I've tried declaring Arial in different ways, using px instead of em and also define the weight in number (600, 800)... But IE9 still renders is "bolder" than the other browsers:
Any help? Thanks

You might have a different problem, since you said you tried a weight of 600, but generally, when you tell IE 9 to render Arial as bold, what you end up seeing is not Arial, but Arial Black. This switch will happen for font-weights of 800 and 900.
To have a bold Arial in IE 9 without switching to Arial Black, use...
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.75em;
font-weight: 700;
This should also address the same issue in Firefox.

This question has been answered on StackOverflow before.
It's a browser issue, IE9 renders fonts different. It uses a ClearType technique called DirectWrite.
In my personal opinion, this isn't a big problem. Websites never look absolutly similiar in every browser. If it really bothers you, it's possible to add IE-Hacks (e.g. force the browser to use IE8-rendering) but I wouldn't recommend it.

Just to weigh in, you could place a meta tag into your HTML as a quick workaround, which will tell IE9 to emulate IE8, bringing back the original rendering.
To do this, place <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" /> in your section.
However this will come at the expense of other IE9 features you may need, like the better HTML5 and CSS3 support.

IE in general tends to give me headaches.
What I would do is use conditional CSS and remove the bold from the IE css
<!--[if IE 9]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/ie9.css" />
<![endif]-->
And then define it like this
font-family: 'Arial', sans-serif;
font-size: 0.75em;

I came across this issue when I accidentally set the font-weight:bold on the body tag. For some reason IE9 rendered all my Arial text bolder than other browsers.

Related

Why is iOS Safari adding extra letter-spacing?

I think I have found a web rendering bug for Google Fonts in Mobile (iOS 8) Safari. It seems to me that Mobile Safari adds a tiny bit of letter-spacing to all text that uses Google Fonts, or that it uses another font. It doesn't matter which Google Font I try (Open Sans). It renders correctly on all modern browsers. Tested Android, FF, Chrome, Safari.
Try to load this page on a iOS device to see what I mean. See also see code and screenshot. See this link for live review: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/430406/Temp%20%5Bok%20to%20delete%5D/Checking%20Font/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</head>
<body>
<h2 style="font-family: 'Roboto'">Roboto: Looks like it gets a bit extra line-spacing in iOS Safari, though this is not possible to find in web inspector</h2>
<h2 style="font-family: 'Arial'">Arial: Works fine in iOS Safari</h2>
</body>
</html>
I found the solution in this question: iOS 4.2+ webfont (ttf) 's bold font-weight rendering bug
Mobile Safari is buggy rendering faux font weights, if you don't set the font-weight (to eg. font-weight: 400 or font-weight: normal) You need to specifically set the css font weight for it to render correctly in mobile safari.
This is the solution.
h2 {
font-weight: 400;
}
Note that Google Web Fonts only exports the regular weight (400) by default, which can lead to Mobile Safari (and other browsers) being forced to impose faux bold.
To explicitly export bolder weights, select "CUSTOMISE" in the Google Web Font font selection pane, manually check each additional weight you require, and use the updated embed code.
)]1
I've just had a similar problem which I resolved. I'm using the Lato font family from Google Fonts and Safari was adding letter spacing even when explicitly using font-weight: 600.
I imported only the font weights 400, 500 & 600, as these were the only weights I was using. After many hours I just decided to try also importing font weight 700 and this fixed my issue... Safari was no longer adding letter spacing when using font-weight: 600!
So even though I explicitly use font-weight: 600, Safari seemed to need the 700 variant as well to render the 600-weighted font properly. Very odd.
Need to specify font-weight
#font-face {
font-family: 'Din';
src: url('./DinRoundRegular.otf');
font-size: 16px;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
font-weight: 400;
}
#font-face {
font-family: 'Din';
src: url('./DINRoundPro-Medi.ttf');
font-size: 16px;
font-style: bold;
font-weight: 700;
}

Font weight ignored in Chrome

I created a fiddle trying to use Open Sans font with font-weight 300:
HTML
<span class="demo">example</span>
CSS
.demo {
font-weight: 400 !important;
font-family: 'Open Sans' !important;
font-style: normal;
font-variant: normal;
}
I use Google fonts to define the CSS
I can see a difference in Firefox (Ubuntu 13.10) when rendering at font-weight: 300 (light) and at font-weight: 400 (normal) but none in Chrome (Version 33.0.1750.117
), where everything looks like it's rendered at font-weight:400. Am I doing something wrong or is there a bug in Chrome? Is there any known workaround?
Update:
There is definitely something wrong with chrome I have two instances of the same page open in 2 different windows in Chrome. One is rendering the font ok (300 weight corresponds to the light variant) and one is not (300 weight is the same as the Normal variant). Any clues? I've made sure to refresh the page in each tab so they are actually the same page.
Update 2:
Attached screenshot: of the bug:
Update 3
This is not a duplicate of this. In that question the problem is that "Arial Black" and "Arial" are different fonts actually. In my case Open Sans is the only font and the problem is Chrome picking up the incorrect weight some times. As you can see from the screenshots, Chrome is not consistent with the font rendered even between two instances.
Add this to your CSS:
* {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;}
This seems to be a Chrome/Chromium bug, caused by having the font installed locally on your system. Other browsers don't seem to suffer from this issue.
So far, it seems to occur on Linux and Windows (confirmed).
For some reason, it will just load your local font and ignore any of your font-weight rules, even if they're !important. It won't even be consistent with itself: the font weight can change randomly between tabs and page reloads.
The simplest workaround is to remove the font, but that could be an issue if you need it for something else.
You might also try renaming the font to something else in order to force Chrome to use your web font and honour your CSS font rules.
I was having this issue with a variable font. It was solved by defining a font-weight range in the font-face definition.
#font-face {
font-family: …;
font-weight: 1 999;
src: …;
}
Try changing the font family to 'Open Sans Light', sans-serif;. I had the same problem and this worked for me.
i overlaid them on top of each other and they look good on osx chrome.
font-weight: 400 !important;
beneath
font-weight: 300 !important;
http://jsfiddle.net/gpmXe/22/
My solution is download and install all the weight types of the font on your machine, or don't install it at all. That's odd solution, but works for me.
For me the solution was to include the CSS in the head-section instead of using #import inside the stylesheet.
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans:ital,wght#0,700;1,400&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
In HTML use this instead of using it in CSS. Best Solution 👍
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans:ital,wght#0,700;1,400&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
Doc for ital & wght

Conditional comment in IE10+ to deal with lack of text-rendering declaration

I have the following css:
h1{
font-family: "tablet-gothic-n9", "tablet-gothic", sans-serif;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 900;
text-rendering: geometricPrecision;
letter-spacing: 0.05em;
}
This lays out the text beautifully in Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
IE doesn't support text-rendering and as such won't display proper letter pairs and ligatures. This results in letters having wider spacing. As such, I want to set letter-spacing: 0 for all versions of IE.
I did the following in the header of my page, below the stylesheet link:
<!--[if IE]>
<style>
h1{
letter-spacing: 0;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
This works fine in IE8 and 9, but fails in IE10 and 11 as these latter browsers don't read conditional comments.
I've tried adding the following to the head of the page:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE9">
as suggested here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh801214(v=vs.85).aspx
But this doesn't seem to work.
Any solutions to get IE10 and 11 to set letter-spacing: 0?
for IE9 and earlier, you can the following for 6,7,8 and 9 in most cases (I have tested your one):
letter-spacing:.05em;
letter-spacing:0px\9;
For IE 10 please check this IE 10 Hack article and StackOverFlow [question]: How do I target only Internet Explorer 10 for certain situations like Internet Explorer-specific CSS or Internet Explorer-specific JavaScript code?
For kerning (which is probably what “proper letter pairs” means in the question) and ligatures, you can use the font-feature-settings property. It is supported by IE 10 and newer, so you avoid the need for “conditional comments” (which don’t work on IE 10 and newer).
h1 { font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga" }
(possibly adding "clig" etc., but I doubt whether Tablet Gothic has ligatures beyond “standard ligatures”).

Open Sans Google Web Fonts Rendering in Chrome

I've noticed a significant difference in rending of Open Sans (Google Web Font) from Chrome, to Safari/Firefox. I attach two photos, the first being chrome and the second safari.
All I have in the stylesheet is:
font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
Hope you can help, as I really like the chrome (first image) rendering but HATE the other one!!
Add to head
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,600,300' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
CSS rule
.btn{
font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
font-weight:300;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
font-size: .9em;
}
I've had luck in the past using font-weight: lighter!important; on fonts that appear bolder and completely different than what they are intended to look like. Each browser interprets fonts differently. Google Web Fonts tries its best to serve the correct versions, but sometimes there are drastic changes between browsers and operating systems.
Hope this information helps! Let me know if this solution works, otherwise I can look into it further. Open Sans is a nice font for web, nice choice :)
I added directly this line im my header and it's working!
<link href='//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,600' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
.nav > li > a {
color: #000; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 600;
}
Instead of just calling the font without sizes in the Header and defining it afterward as bold, a method who doesn't work.
There is an issue where Safari renders fonts at fixed sizes and other browsers render them more exactly:
example at tech.Ozake.com
So if you request your text to be a size that falls between two of Safari's steps, you will get a different result in Safari than in other browsers.
So depending on how you declare the font sizes and how the window is sized, you will get differently-sized results.
This workaround helped me to make Open Sans to look very close in different browsers.
<script>
function loadCss(path){
var fileref=document.createElement("link");
fileref.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
fileref.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
fileref.setAttribute("href", path);
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(fileref);
}
if (ViewUtil.isChromeBrowser()) {
loadCss('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,600');
} else {
loadCss('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,600');
}
we are forcing a bit 'bolder' version of font for chrome
You apparently didn't reset the default browser CSS, try setting font-weight explicitly.

Is there any difference in using a font Arial Black or Arial with the <Strong> tag?

My text that is supposed to be Arial Black is not working on Firefox. It's just displayed as a regular text. So I used Arial font with the Strong tag. I can't make a difference between the way they look. Is there anything I should worry about?
Thank you
EDIT
In this particular case I can't use CSS to do it so that's how i did it:
<font face="Arial Black, Arial, sans-serif"> <strong>Want an undergraduate course with more opportunity for hands-on practice? </strong></font>
Thanks for all the answers and explanations, I believe the strong tag is not wrong here as this is the most important part in the whole message. The visual difference wasn't noticed by anybody, that's confirmation enough for me.
I posted in jsfiddle and it surprised me the strong tag didn't add the bold effect i was expecting! The b did. You can clearly see the difference there! Thanks for that suggestion!
With regard to the question title (as the question text seems to ask differently):
The <strong> tag carries a semantic meaning. Citing MDN on this
The HTML Strong Element () gives text strong importance, and is typically displayed in bold.
So in the first place you should use this tag so mark up content, that you want to emphasize and not to get text marked bold.
Most browsers, however, will implement that emphasizing as just bold printed text.
If you just want to have bold text, use the respective CSS for it!
font-weight: bold;
<strong> holds a certain semantic meaning (along the lines of "more important"), and as such should be avoided purely to style something. If you want to "bold" the text, just add font-weight: 700.
Or you know, fix the reason Arial Black isn't working :P It may be that you didn't add speech marks around Arial Black.
font-family: Arial;
is completely acceptable, but
font-family: Arial Black;
is not. Make sure you have
font-family: "Arial Black";
Yes, there is a considerable difference in using Arial Black vs. Arial with the strong element. I will answer in CSS terms, substituting the CSS setting font-weight: bolder for HTML strong markup. (It's really irrelevant here whether you call for bold face directly in CSS or indirectly with HTML markup that implies a certain default setting.)
It is not clear what you mean by “Arial Black is not working on Firefox”.
The most logical CSS code for the purpose would be:
font-family: Arial; font-weight: 900;
This asks for the boldest available font in the Arial font family; that’s Arial Black when available, or else Arial Bold. Firefox does not seem to support this quite consistently, but many browsers have even more serious problems with font heights. (E.g., Chrome shows weight 600 as bolder than 700.)
In practice it is safer to use the old kludgy way, which refers to a specific font (typeface) as if it were a font family:
font-family: Arial Black;
For example, on IE 8, this is the only way to get Arial Black, whereas IE 9 supports the logical way, too (in “Standards Mode”).
If you use set the font to Arial and font weight to bolder, you get Arial Bold. If you set font-family: Arial Black and font-weight: bolder, you get Arial Black, because there is no bolder font. And Arial Bold and Arial Black are very different.
It’s impossible to say what went wrong in your first attempts, as you did not post the actual code used.
I think you would receive the same effect, however I would recommend using CSS styling instead of using the strong tag.
.arial-black{
font-family: Arial;
font-weight: bold;
}
There is no visual difference between the <strong>, <b> and font-weight:700|bold;.
However <strong> is used by screen readers (for the blind and partially sighted) to put emphasis on the text... therefore using a "bold" font will not result in the same thing for screen readers.
If you don't want to "emphasis" the text for screen readers, then I would recommend you use the <b> tag instead.
<strong> tag does not support all browsers, as Arial and Arial black is concerned both are different in size or weight you can say.
So answer to your question is yes.
Using the font Arial Black in a web page only works for the users that actually have that font installed. (Of course, using Arial also only works on systems that have that font).
Arial Black is not just a bold version of Arial. Although similar, Arial Black has a different look than the bold version of Arial:
Arial, bold
Arial Black
You should use a fallback font for all fonts that you use, so that the browser knows what to use if that specific font isn't available, however it's tricky to use a font that is bold by default, as you can't specify Arial bold as fallback for Arial Black. You would have to make do with using Arial as fallback:
font-family: 'Arial Black', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
You could use a #font-face rule to force Arial Black whenever the bold font-weight of Arial is used:
#font-face {
font-family: Arial;
/* You can add other common names using comma-separated local definitions here */
src: local('Arial Black');
font-weight: bold;
}
#font-face {
font-family: Arial;
src: local('Arial');
font-weight: normal;
}
Now, whenever Arial is set as the font for an element and the calculated font weight is bold (which is what user agents set for the string tag in their html.css definitions), Arial Black is used instead.
strong tag basically creates your text in bold. For your case it makes no difference. But it will create a difference if your font is different and you are using "strong"