HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS- P14: I’ve been around the Web for a while now some might say I’ve been here from the beginning. And one thing that always bothered me about the Web was its inherent inability to disentangle content from presentation. | font-size-adjust The apparent size of a font has more to do with the height of lowercase letters the x-height than with the actual font size. At 100 points Myriad Web has an x-height of 48 points lowercase letters are 48 as tall as the font size. This ratio is called the aspect value of the font. So in other words Myriad Web has an aspect value of . However Verdana has an aspect value of . If you specified Myriad Web as your desired font but the user s browser substitutes Verdana for it because Myriad Web is not available the text will look larger because of the substitute font s higher aspect value. If you set the font-size-adjust property to the aspect value of your preferred font the browser should be able to adjust the sizes of substitute fonts to give them the x-height you want. This assumes the browser knows or can detect the aspect value of the substitute font. Inherited Yes See also font Value The property takes as its value the aspect value of your preferred font. This is used in combination with the font-size property to adjust the size of a substitute font so that it s displayed with the desired x-height. The special value none disables font size adjustment for the element. Initial value none Compatibility CSS Version 2 The property is not supported in any currently available browser. Example This style rule assigns a set of fonts to the body element and uses font-size-adjust to ensure that whatever font is used it will have the same x-height as Myriad Web the preferred font at 11 points body font-family Myriad Web Verdana Helvetica sans-serif font-size-adjust The aspect value of Myriad Web 369 Licensed to siowchen@ Appendix C CSS Property Reference font-stretch Many font families Futura comes to mind not only have different weights . normal light bold and styles . normal italic oblique but also different densities . normal condensed extended . This property lets you select the density of the font to be displayed in an .
