Talk:Verdana

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Someone here contributed the comment that Verdana exists on 93% of all computers according to a "survey". Is there a reference to this survey or to any survey that quantifies the percentage of machines that have any particular font installed?

Well I found some web pages that gave a similar number for installations of MSIE but it looks dubious to me, so I removed it until someone substantiates. --Grouse 14:22, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

From the article:

This bug does not reveal itself with Latin letters: àe áe ãe ảe

And yet those accents are most definitely over the "e"s for me - go figure! In fact, it seems to depend what browser I use: they're fine in IE (the latin ones, that is), but wrong in Mozilla. So is this the font definition, or something else? :-/ - IMSoP 22:24, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

It is the font definition.  Mozilla simply breaks font kerning somehow. — Monedula 01:20, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
On a reverse note, while the Greek and Cyrillic are broken in IE, they all display correctly in Opera. That appears to be hard-coded behavior though—looking at the font with various tools it seems that Verdana's bug is that all its combining characters are set to combine over the following character by default. The only reason they appear "properly" over the Latin characters is because font rendering sees a + combining tilde and displays the glyph for a with combining tilde, which is more likely to be cleaner than trying to display both characters one over the other. For any character without a precombined glyph it will try to display it incorrectly, even on Latin characters: z̃z for example should have the tilde on the first z, but it doesn't. (Except apparently in Opera; that account of Mozilla's behavior shows that Mozilla is actually being strictly correct.) —Muke Tever 19:43, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I think that Opera takes the combining character from some other font, what is why everything seems correct.  The same thing apply to Mozilla under Linux.— Monedula 10:52, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
I see them over the e as well, using Bitstream Vera in Firefox nightly on linux (with xft font rendering). A Mozilla bug rather than a Verdana one? Any bug reports in the Microsoft tracker? Anything else to back this up? My googling didn't turn anything up so far. -- Gabriel Wicke 12:48, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Mozilla may take the combining accent from another font.  Try changing the font for "Unicode". — Monedula 22:57, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Why Microsoft doesnt fix this Verdana bug? Someone post them report? 212.5.168.149
Image:Ffcombiningchar.png
today's Firefox nightly (branch, linux, xft/gtk2) with Bitstream Vera Font
There's no single occurence of Verdana in my mozilla prefs, they all default to Bitstream. I also doubt that fontconfig substitutes verdana fonts (they don't resemble verdana). -- Gabriel Wicke 02:04, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Scrap this- i didn't notice the font was forced in the source, it looks just the same here with Bitstream VeraSans as the default font...
I've experimented with wrapping diacrits in a span with a class using a regex- this works fine for html entities of the ten or so most popular diacritical marks, i didn't figure out how to do a range match for unicode yet though. php per-compatible regexes lack perl's \U feature. -- Gabriel Wicke 15:16, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Font vs Typeface

And elementary difference. A typeface such as Times New Roman or Verdana, consists of many fonts which are differentiated by weight, angle and size, e.g.

  • 12pt Verdana Bold Italic
  • 16pt Verdana Normal
  • 9pt Verdana Italic

The fonts are adjusted for visual balance. For example, if you magnified an 8pt Time font to match the size of a 12pt one, they would not be identical. The more popular electronic fonts have also been adjusted (hinted) to improve rendering at small sizes. dramatic 21:54, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Highways

Is this used for highway signs? It looks very similar to the font used for highway signs. If it used on highway signs, mention it in the article. --SuperDude 15:20, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

  • No, highway signs use specific fonts called FHWA (named after the Federal Highway Administration). [1] Zzyzx11 | Talk 15:31, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • We could put the FHWA standard font title in the "see also" section of this article! --69.209.136.192 00:47, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bug

I've tagged the "bug" section with unreferenced. If someone doesn't soon add proof, including details of whether the bug still applies, this needs to be removed. Superm401 - Talk 02:58, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

We have a problem - Wikipedia's description of the bug is the clearest one around, and has been copied and referenced widely. In searching for references I've avoided anything too similar to this article's wording. Also, in this field, most research and information is published in blogs (many of them highly reputable) e.g. to date, all information on the beta of Internet Explorer 8 has been released by way of various Microsoft blogs. I found several descriptions of the phenomenon where the author stated they were using verdana but hadn't realised that the problem they were describing was specific to verdana. The bug also caused issues with the wikimedia codebase. Any detailed description probably lies within Microsoft's bug tracking database, which is not publically accessible. The bug is self-verifying in the example given, so I think that in the circumstances we need to accept minimal referencing. Removing the content would be a disservice.dramatic (talk) 17:50, 25 March 2008 (UTC)