IE6 difference in font rendering under XP and 2000

G

Guest

I have a website that looks fine using IE6 running on Windows XP and Windows
2003 Server.

The very same website renders incorrectly in IE6 on Windows 2000 (and also
Mozilla under Win2000).

Specifically, the fonts are rendering slightly larger under windows 2000,
causing table and image alignment problems. All text is marked up with CSS in
a linked CSS file. The fonts look right (family, color, weight, etc) except
that the output under a Win2000 system comes out slightly larger (just enough
to make the site look like garbage when text containers grow due to wrapping
text).

This is with IE6, fully patched. And all OS's fully patched.

I have done a few google searches, and nothing stands out. Any ideas on what
I need to fix?
 
C

C A Upsdell

Keith said:
I have a website that looks fine using IE6 running on Windows XP and Windows
2003 Server.

The very same website renders incorrectly in IE6 on Windows 2000 (and also
Mozilla under Win2000).

Specifically, the fonts are rendering slightly larger under windows 2000,
causing table and image alignment problems. All text is marked up with CSS in
a linked CSS file. The fonts look right (family, color, weight, etc) except
that the output under a Win2000 system comes out slightly larger (just enough
to make the site look like garbage when text containers grow due to wrapping
text).
Click to expand...

Fonts being rendered slightly larger? So what? You should design your
site to handle a wide range of font sizes, because your visitors will
have a wide range of preferred font sizes. If your design can't handle
this, scrap your design and start over from scratch.
 
G

Guest

I use a very basic font (Tahoma), and control the attributes with CSS (8pt).
There is nothing left to chance. The font APPEARS the same on both platforms
- correct font style, weight, etc, just windows 2000 seems to be adding a
tiny bit more kerning spacing or rendering at 9pt instead of 8pt. Or perhaps
its the XP/2003 renderer that is wrong, and they are rendering too small.

Like I said, this isn't a browser incompatibility (same exact version of IE,
patched to same SP level). This is some lower-level OS difference. Changing
the preferred font size has no impact at all here, since the CSS style
specifically defines the font size in points.

"starting over" will accomplish nothing. I need to know WHY the disparity
exists, otherwise I am doomed to repeat it.
 
G

Guest

The font size is dictated in CSS style as "font-size:8pt;", Text Size
preference does not apply in this case. At least not as far as I know.

I chose to dictate the font sizes in CSS like this since the site layout is
very complex and positioning dependant. If I allow the viewer to willy-nilly
change font size, it completely screws up the layout.

I suspect the strange behavior might be related to this web page being done
as "XHTML". I have read a few posts that allude to IE incompatibilities with
XHTML. So perhaps therein lies my problem? the top of the page is marked up
as such:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Perhaps I would be better off changing this?

Keith


Frank Saunders said:
Did you try View | Text Size?

--
Frank Saunders, MS-MVP, IE/OE
Please respond in Newsgroup. Do not send email
http://www.fjsmjs.com
Protect your PC
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/
Click to expand...
 
C

C A Upsdell

Keith said:
I use a very basic font (Tahoma), and control the attributes with CSS (8pt).
There is nothing left to chance. The font APPEARS the same on both platforms
- correct font style, weight, etc, just windows 2000 seems to be adding a
tiny bit more kerning spacing or rendering at 9pt instead of 8pt. Or perhaps
its the XP/2003 renderer that is wrong, and they are rendering too small.
Click to expand...

I suggest that you re-think specifying font sizes in points. Specifying
font sizes in absolute units like points or pixels can result in
unreadably small text on many PCs ... including mine at 8pt.
"starting over" will accomplish nothing. I need to know WHY the disparity
exists, otherwise I am doomed to repeat it.
Click to expand...

Starting over might give you a chance to make a site that is usable for
all your visitors, not just those with good visual acuity.
 

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