in CSS setting the font-size on the body tag to 62.5% gives you a base unit of ten pixels so to set type to 12 pixels high specify 120% and so on. Using percentage fonts allows the designer to set well balanced type while letting the user have control over the size.
960
The average web page width, gives decent guttering either side of centred content on a 1024 screen. Also allows beautiful grid based designs using 12 columns with 10px guttering either side, see http://960.gs/ for more on grid systems
600
A reasonable approximation of the much over emphasised fold, the initial viewable area of a web page on the ’standard’ screen size of 1024×768. Different browsers come equipped with a bunch of features that take up space around the actual page contents. To allow for this negative space across the major browsers a page depth of 600 pixels fits like a glove.
1.6180339887 - The Mighty Phi
In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.
For a while now I have been faced with an unusual, yet visually interesting, font substitution issue with my web browsers. It seems like every time a webpage requests any face from the Helvetica family, Safari et.al decides that the most suitable one would be the fractions.
a small fraction of the Coda Site
and how Panic intended it to look
I have tried a couple of things to fix this but have always focused on the browsers themselves, looking in vain for some way to tell them NOT TO USE THE FRACTIONS FONTFACE. Eventually I gave up and, reasoning that I have needed to use the face only once in the p`st six months, I disabled it in FontBook.
demon be gone
I cant tell if this issue resulted in me installing some fonts in a bad way or if it is an error more people are likely to see, so far none of the other macs at work have suffered so I am hoping the risk is negligable enough for me to continue using Helvetica on any sites that need it.
