Re: Test Equation

[Andy Dougherty <doughera@LAFAYETTE.EDU>]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Doug Craigen wrote:

> Do you have a font named "symbol" on your computer?

Yes, but Netscape apparently isn't loading it.  (I don't know why -- the
directory containing it is in my Font Path.)

>                                                        How about "arial"?

No.

> Controlling fonts on web pages is not for the faint of heart - it can
> lead to very peculiar results on other people's computers.

Yes.  That was precisely my point.

> When writing <font face="arial"> it is safer to write
> <font face="arial,helvetica,verdana"> instead.

No, it's actually not safer.  It's potentially worse.  Unix systems
typically don't have arial, but do have helvetica.  (Verdana is
Microsoft-specific and not available for Unix for free, last time I
checked.)  Though both arial and helvetica are sans serif fonts, helvetica
is considerably narrower. Hence something that looks perfectly readable in
arial may be squashed very badly together in helvetica and rendered
unreadable.  This is especially the case if a smaller-than-default font
size is also used.

--
    Andy Dougherty              doughera@lafayette.edu
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042