B.40. font-size-adjust

If you've ever compared two different fonts at the same point size and thought that one looked considerably smaller than the other, you have encountered the reason for this property. Correctly setting this property lets the browser adjust for font differences to preserve the apparent size if it needs to use a different font than the one you specified (e.g. if the font you specified was not available on the user's system).

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. In other words, ...

Get HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS 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.