i have been building a website using a windows development box so far. the site has turned out well, until i noticed that the same pages appear a little out of place as far as alignment is concerned in a linux dev box. the issue is because of the font being used in both these boxes.
here’s my css –
font-family: tahoma, sans-serif;
the entire site has been designed with tahoma as the base font, and so if the font changes, because of the inherent width/height difference between fonts, they might end up taking more space for the same word than tahoma, and result in layout issues. Even in the windows box, if tahoma is not available, then the site would fallback into sans-serif which would most likely cause problems. so to say, the site is designed for tahoma users 😀 (i know this is bad practice).
while this maynot be a problem since tahoma will be present in all windows boxes, linux/ other OS users would face layout problems.
how do i resolve this issue..? i still want to use tahoma in the site.
In my experience you can never expect that a font on a web page will look exactly as you expected in all browsers / OSs. Flash does come close with the embedding feature, but for good ol HTML/CSS the best thing I’ve seen is TypeKit. I looked and they do not have Tahoma, but they likely have something similar to it.
As a general rule, I try to design my pages to allow for font displaying variations.