Text appears larger in Safari than in Firefox

pawpour · August 15th, 2007, 07:59 AM

Hi everyone. This is my first post. Thanks for a useful looking site.

I'm building a site using Dreamweaver, with CSS, on a Mac. It's up at www.JamesSchumann.com.

I've only tested this on Firefox/ Safari, not yet on IE or NN, or a PC.

The text (both paragraph and headings) appears larger on Safari than on Firefox. Is this a fact of life, or have I made a mistake, or can I do anything about it?

The font size is determined by: the CSS rule font-size:medium in the Body tag, and CSS rules for each of the DIV tags on the page, which are: font-size: 80%, line-height: 120%

As far as I can tell, they're the only things affecting the font size.

hope you can help,

cheers, James

MikeHopley · August 15th, 2007, 09:34 AM

The text is not larger: it's just more bold.

Safari has a strong text-smoothing algorithm, which has the effect of making the text weight much heavier. On the default setting (at least on my PC), it's insanely bold.

There's nothing you can do about this. Users will see your website at least a little differently from you; that's life.

pawpour · August 15th, 2007, 10:13 AM

ok,thanks for that, Mike.

I haven't made it bold in any way myself. I'm surprised at the amount of difference in apparent size/boldness between the two browsers (on my computer, anyway). If I make it smaller then it's hard to read in Firefox. Oh well....

James