[Pro] Font-family

Freeway
1

I’ve just finished site, and recently bought the new Coda and I thought I’d open the new (Freeway) site in Coda, just to familiarise myself with Coda.
I’d chosen Helvetica as the font for body copy and the h1 tag throughout the site but looking at the Freeway CSS in Coda it says:

h1 { color:#808080; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-style:italic; font-weight:bold; font-size:13px; line-height:1.4 }

and:

p { color:#666; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:13px; line-height:1.6; margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:5px }

I didn’t actually specify a font-family in Freeway, I just specified Helvetica and let Freeway take care of the rest, but I wonder why Freeway has put in Arial as the first choice font? It is, incidentally, displaying properly as Helvetica, not Arial.

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2

Paul,

That is one of the many weird things of FW. - some discussion about it here - http://www.freewaytalk.net/thread/view/65778#m_65874

Marcel

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3

On 28 May 2012, at 16:05, Helveticus wrote:

Paul,

That is one of the many weird things of FW. - some discussion about it here -http://www.freewaytalk.net/thread/view/65778#m_65874

Thanks for that Marcel, good to know I’m not alone…

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

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4

Hi Paul,
I’m uncertain of the history of this one but it certainly is an oddity about Freeway. At some point the default font for the font set Helvetica became Arial.

In Freeway with no documents open if you select Edit > Font Sets and select the Helvetica set you can reset this to Helvetica rather than Arial as the primary font. Once edited it will stay like this for all new documents you create.

I suspect your site is actually using Arial rather than Helvetica unless the system is having issues with the installed Arial. You can check this by using the Web Inspector in Safari;

  1. Enable the Develop Menu by selecting Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop menu in menu bar
  2. Right-click on your H1 text
  3. Select Inspect Element
  4. In the panel/window that opens you should see the source code for the page on the left with the H1 selected and the properties for this item on the right. One of these will be the Matched CSS Rules for the H1 and specifically the font-family setting. The fonts are listed here in the order they will be used if available.

The Web Inspector is fully interactive so you can play with these values to see how the page reacts. For example if you change the order of the fonts listed in that H1 font set Safari will update the preview for you on the fly. This makes testing your designs with fallback fonts very easy.

You can find out a bit more about the Web Inspector in this KB article; http://www.softpress.com/kb/questions/242/Taking+a+closer+look+at+your+web+site+with+Safari's+Web+inspector
Regards,
Tim.

On 28 May 2012, at 14:54, Paul Bradforth wrote:

I didn’t actually specify a font-family in Freeway, I just specified Helvetica and let Freeway take care of the rest, but I wonder why Freeway has put in Arial as the first choice font? It is, incidentally, displaying properly as Helvetica, not Arial.

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5

On 28 May 2012, at 16:25, Tim Plumb wrote:

I suspect your site is actually using Arial rather than Helvetica unless the system is having issues with the installed Arial. You can check this by using the Web Inspector in Safari;

  1. Enable the Develop Menu by selecting Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop menu in menu bar
  2. Right-click on your H1 text

Thanks Tim; yes, I’m conversant with the Developer tools; I actually opened it in Coda, which showed me the same thing, but thank you for confirming that it’s a Freeway glitch. I’ve since fixed it by defining a font set in Freeway and all is now well.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

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http://www.paulbradforth.com/books/

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6

When I make a font set in Freeway, I change the default name (which tends
to be the first font you choose) to something that reminds me of the whole
font set (like ‘Helvetica Websafe’ or ‘Arial Websafe’). Much like CSS, a
font set is a mini cascade (first choice, second, third, etc). Ultimately
it depends on what fonts your user has loaded at their end and what
preferences they’ve set their browser to, which font they will see. This
means your control of how the type is viewed is very limited.

But this is where you can get creative, as long as you don’t require a
pixel-perfect layout. For example, my favorite set features Helvetica
Neue Light.

body { font-family:"HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
So I’ve made an effort to make sure the page shows up as close to what I
want, but then provided tolerable options for people who don’t use
Helvetica Neue. Arial and sans-serif are simply fallbacks for Win IE users
for whom I am convinced browsing is more of a functional experience than an
aesthetic or spiritual one. C’est la vie.

Here’s a link where you can see some regular web-safe font choices, what
they look like, and how the css code for them works:
http://www.fonttester.com/help/list_of_web_safe_fonts.html
and here: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp

–
Ernie Simpson

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Paul Bradforth email@hiddenwrote:

On 28 May 2012, at 16:25, Tim Plumb wrote:

I suspect your site is actually using Arial rather than Helvetica unless
the system is having issues with the installed Arial. You can check this by
using the Web Inspector in Safari;

  1. Enable the Develop Menu by selecting Safari > Preferences > Advanced
    Show Develop menu in menu bar
  2. Right-click on your H1 text

Thanks Tim; yes, I’m conversant with the Developer tools; I actually
opened it in Coda, which showed me the same thing, but thank you for
confirming that it’s a Freeway glitch. I’ve since fixed it by defining a
font set in Freeway and all is now well.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

Buy my eBooks at:
Hi, it's ebOOxa

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