I’ve been an avid reader of A List Apart for many years. It’s been a long-standing source of information, inspiration and even spiritual guidance. And so it is with immense pleasure and pride that, with How to Size Text in CSS, I can finally say that I am an ALA author.
The motivation for this article was really that I wanted to research IE7 further; to find out how to accurately set text that could be resized across browsers – accuracy and resizability are prerequisites for me. To this end I created a test case and took 161 screenshots across 6 iterations. The end solution may not be all that new to some people, but I felt it important to collate and justify the style rules used.
Mark Boulton wrote:
Fantastic article Rich. The depth of your approach on this is really quite incredible. I think it’s that depth that will make this article a benchmark in the months/years to come.
Alan Wallace wrote:
Another excellent article Richard. It’s great to have evidence that text can be (more or less) pixel perfect cross browser and still retain the ability to be resized.
Thanks for sharing. I can’t believe this is your first ALA article, I was sure you were behind the baseline grid article (Wilson Miners) a few months back.
Roger Gordon wrote:
Congrats!
I just finished reading it, and it was a good article. Definitely worth bookmarking and keeping for posterity. However as some of the commentors on the ALA article noted, there was no mention of the “62.5% font size on body element” technique. What are your thoughts on using this?
Rich wrote:
Thanks all. I’ll be getting to the ALA comments once a few more have been posted. Regarding the 62.5% technique, I introduced that to make the numbers easier to understand in my blog post example. it was never really meant as a suggestion.
As far as I can tell 62.5% wouldn’t do any harm, but I prefer now to just use ems for the actual sizing.
Roger Johansson wrote:
Would love to read it, but unfortunately all I get from www.alistapart.com these days is “403 – Forbidden”. Not sure what I did wrong :-P.
Cezary wrote:
Does 62.5% (or 100% to make a point) assigned to body do the same as .625em (or 1em)? It would be nicer to use one unit throughout the whole stylesheet. Have you made such tests?
CPA Lemmens wrote:
Rich, you proved me a favor – currently our company is searching for standardizing our development approach – articles such as these give me a basis for developing such an approach successfully.
Hence, many thanks for your efforts
Drew Stauffer wrote:
I just read your article on ALA and found my way here. Your article was written quite well. I’m always struggling with fonts and spacing and I will refer to your article next site I develop.
Thanks again.
Jon Tan wrote:
Such thorough research is always a breath of fresh air. Congratulations!
I was recently grappling with the proverbial problem of IE cutting off terminals or loops, especially for absolutely positioned glyphs or text with negative leading. Unitless line-heights seems contributory so it was interesting to see your inheritance results.
Tercume wrote:
nice article
johno wrote:
Congratulations, Richard.
It’s an impressive article, and yet another valuable contribution to web typography. Thank you.
Haarball wrote:
Saved under “seminal”.
Billyboylindien wrote:
Great article.
The em property was ambiguous for me and now it’s ok.
Thanks
Rex wrote:
I often face prob in controlling text size on different browsers…..Thanks Amigo for the technique
Khushal wrote:
Testing the text size on different browser is the most worst part, and you feel pissed wondering why there are so many browsers… Opera, Safari, and IE and Firefox~ gosh~