Font Matching
As we’ve seen, CSS allows for the matching of font families, weights, and variants. This is done through font matching, which is a vaguely complicated procedure. Understanding it is important for authors who wish to help user agents make good font selections when displaying their documents. I left it for the end of this chapter because it’s not really necessary to understand how the font properties work, and some people will probably want to skip this part and go on to Chapter 6. If you’re still interested, here’s how font matching works.
In the first step of font matching, the user agent creates, or otherwise accesses, a database of font properties. This database lists the various CSS1 properties of all the fonts to which the UA has access. Typically, this will be all fonts installed on the machine, although there could be others (for example, the UA could have its own built-in fonts). If the UA encounters two identical fonts, it will simply ignore one of them.
Second, the UA takes apart an element to determine which font properties have been applied, and constructs a list of font properties necessary for the display of that element. Based on that list, the UA makes an initial choice of a font family to use in displaying the element. If there is a complete match, then the UA can use that font. Otherwise, it needs to do a little more work.
Third, if there was no font match in step two, the UA looks for alternate fonts within the same font family. If it finds any, then ...
Get Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
