[Biodevelopers] Re: Fonts (was "Help on Testing")

[David Leader]

The two look quite different on Mac IE5.1. The face in your image 
looks like Courier, whereas on my Mac (which has Courier) it has 
defaulted to Times.

Your source gives no idea how you specified the fonts, which makes it 
more difficult to help you. However what I would advise is to:

1. Use css to specify your fonts.

2. Specify your font sizes in pixels in your style sheet.
Without this the sizes will never match in different platforms.

3. Use one of the following fonts: Verdana or Arial, which are 
present on both Windows and Mac (you've more or less had it with 
Unix/Linux). If you must use Courier (as it appears you have here) 
you need to specify alternative names (Courier, "Courier New") in 
your style sheet.

In addition, you use an iFrame, which is not supported by Netscape 
and older Mac browsers and in any case gives you a fixed size which 
results in problems if the text doesn't fit. You are better to use a 
css div with a border.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to learn some css eg:
http://richinstyle.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear/fear1.html
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/

And ignore the advice about not supporting pre-2000 browsers. The 
bioinformatics community has the oldest browsers anywhere. You need 
to check that your work looks reasonable, at least, on the 5-year old 
Netscape 4.x. and good on IE5 PC.

David Leader
-- 
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  David P.Leader, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
  Davidson Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
  Phone: +44 41 330-5905                d.leader at bio.gla.ac.uk
            http://doolittle.ibls.gla.ac.uk/leader
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