<tt> with "font-size: 100%" ?

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Andreas Prilop - 29 Oct 2003 20:29 GMT

Internet Explorer displays <tt>, <code> etc. in a smaller font size:
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/monospace.html
I don't like the idea that monospaced text is displayed in a different
size. Should we state "font-size: 100%" with monospaced text?

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Stephen Poley - 30 Oct 2003 10:54 GMT

>Internet Explorer displays <tt>, <code> etc. in a smaller font size:
> http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/monospace.html
>I don't like the idea that monospaced text is displayed in a different
>size. Should we state "font-size: 100%" with monospaced text?

It's a question of preference: monospaced characters are wider than the
average character width of almost all proportional fonts, so quite a lot
of people - including myself - prefer them to be displayed at about 90%,
which is about as legible as a typical proportional font at 100%.

Which reminds me of a Netscape 4 funny: it displays <PRE> at 90% - but
if you specify PRE {font-size: 90%} it displays it at 100%.

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Jukka K. Korpela - 30 Oct 2003 12:09 GMT

> It's a question of preference: monospaced characters are wider than the
> average character width of almost all proportional fonts, so quite a lot
> of people - including myself - prefer them to be displayed at about 90%,
> which is about as legible as a typical proportional font at 100%.

There's another thing too that favors somewhat reduced font size. Typically,
monospace font is used for computer code excerpts, which are technical
information, presented as examples or for reference. Being somewhat less
important than copy text in the average, it's usually OK to use smaller font
size.

But if there's some other reason for using monospace, e.g. if you use them
for artistic purposes, then suggesting font-size: 100% might be a good idea.
However the font may get subjectively rather big that way.

The choice of the monospace font face is important too. Specifically,
Courier New (a common default) looks considerably larger than Courier of the
same size. So if you set
pre, code, samp, kbd, tt { font-family : Courier, monospace; }
you will effectively reduce the subjective font size - in a manner which
seems adequate for most purposes IMHO. If copy text is conveniently
readable, then Courier, even if somewhat reduced in size by browser
defaults, should produce legible presentation for code-like text.

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Alan J. Flavell - 30 Oct 2003 13:31 GMT

> The choice of the monospace font face is important too. Specifically,
> Courier New (a common default) looks considerably larger than Courier of the
> same size. So if you set
> pre, code, samp, kbd, tt { font-family : Courier, monospace; }
> you will effectively reduce the subjective font size - in a manner which
> seems adequate for most purposes IMHO.

No disagreement on the purely cosmetic side of the discussion...

Just a word of warning that the regular Microsoft monospace fonts are
distinctly short in the i18n department, and differently so depending
on which font face is used. There's some discussion on my page
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/browsers-fonts.html
under the sub-heading "Monospace fonts", but the open issue raised
there seems to be still open.

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Stanimir Stamenkov - 30 Oct 2003 13:49 GMT

> The choice of the monospace font face is important too. Specifically,
> Courier New (a common default) looks considerably larger than Courier of the
> same size.

The "Courier" font on my system is a bitmap/raster font (with
predefined sizes). Strangely, Netscape/Mozilla substitutes it with
"Courier New" in the display. Aside, "Courier New" and "Courier"
display the same sizes on my system. Here's a screenshot from IE:

http://www.geocities.com/stanio/temp/Courier.png

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Nick Theodorakis - 31 Oct 2003 05:38 GMT

>The "Courier" font on my system is a bitmap/raster font (with
>predefined sizes). Strangely, Netscape/Mozilla substitutes it with
>"Courier New" in the display.

I've found Mozilla will also subsitute Arial for Helvetica on my
system. I wonder if it "second-guesses" other font choices besides
these.

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis
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nicholas_theodorakis [at] urmc [dot] rochester [dot] edu

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Brian - 31 Oct 2003 07:29 GMT

> The "Courier" font on my system is a bitmap/raster font (with
> predefined sizes). Strangely, Netscape/Mozilla substitutes it with
> "Courier New" in the display.

To the bitter dismay of a game site I use. The change in font plays
havoc with the display of game maps, to the point where Mozilla is
unusable.

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Tim - 31 Oct 2003 16:09 GMT

Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

>> The "Courier" font on my system is a bitmap/raster font (with
>> predefined sizes). Strangely, Netscape/Mozilla substitutes it with
>> "Courier New" in the display.

> To the bitter dismay of a game site I use. The change in font plays
> havoc with the display of game maps, to the point where Mozilla is
> unusable.

To be brutal, that's the game's fault, not the browser. You just cant
use HTML for laying out a page. Even with CSS, it's still not a
precision language.

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Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / October 2003

<tt> with "font-size: 100%" ?