Describe the font sans serif and serif

Document directory

• General comparison between serif and sans serif
• Purpose:
• Practical Application
• References

Original article: http://yx.takeback.net/121/serif-font.html

Read the serif Vs of lgj font notes. sans serif Note 1 is suddenly open-minded, and finally understands what the sans serif font is, what the serif font is, where the sans serif font should be used, and where the serif font should be used. I think it is quite necessary to understand these problems, whether it is for web designer or common users. For example, in many browsers, the corresponding settings are involved.

In the Roman alphabet camp in western countries, there are two main types of fonts: sans serif and serif. Although the typewriter also belongs to sans serif, it is an equal-width font, therefore, monospace is independent. For example, in the web, the same width font is often used to represent code.

Serif indicates that there is additional decoration at the beginning and end of the stroke, and the stroke width varies depending on the straight stroke. On the contrary, sans serif does not have these additional decorations, and the stroke width is roughly the same. For example:

We can see that the usual Georgia, Times New Roman, etc. belong to the serif font, while Arial, tahoma, verdana, etc. belong to the sans serif font. For Chinese, these two types are also available. Obviously, and (commonly used in traditional Chinese) belong to Serif, while simhei and youyuan belong to sans serif.

General comparison between serif and sans serif

Serif fonts are easy to recognize, so they are easy to recognize. On the contrary, sans serif is eye-catching. However, in terms of reading texts, sans serif is prone to letter recognition problems, which often causes re-reading back and forth and disorder of upper and lower lines.

Serif emphasizes the start and end of a letter stroke, so it is easier to identify the front and back continuity.

Serif emphasizes a word rather than a single letter, while sans serif emphasizes individual letters.

In small fonts, sans serif is usually clearer than serif.

Purpose:

Generally, the content and body of an article use the preferred serif font, which can increase the ease of reading and reading for a long time, because the unit is word, it is not easy to get tired. The title and table text are in the sans serif font that is eye-catching. It needs to be eye-catching, but you don't have to stare at these words for a long time.

For eye-catching purposes like publicity materials and posters, sans serif fonts are also used for short paragraphs. However, when the body of books, newspapers, magazines, and so on is too long, the serif font should be used to relieve the reader's reading burden. This principle should also be followed in web design and browser settings.

Practical Application

In Firefox (currently only Firefox has this function), you can separately specify the Chinese and Western text bodies of sans serif, Serif, and monospace. However, this option is not set in the tool menu, however, you can type about: config in addressbar and filter the font in the filter to find the following preference name:

font.name.monospace.x-westernfont.name.monospace.zh-CNfont.name.sans-serif.x-westernfont.name.sans-serif.zh-CNfont.name.serif.x-westernfont.name.serif.zh-CN

You can specify a font Based on the sans serif, Serif, and monospace principles. Follow W3C CSS rules. Note 2) in the end, you must specify a generic-family such as serif to avoid using the default serif font on the local machine when the client does not specify a font.

Because of this feature of Mozilla browsers, we can set Chinese and Western text bodies to enrich the layout in CSS font settings, for example, we specify a group of small fonts (similar to the date, author, and category under the title of this article ):

Font-family: Arial, pmingliu, sans-serif;/* According to the previous article, sans-serif is clearer in small fonts, so you can specify an Arial randomly, as a serif pmingliu, it also has a good appearance when displaying small fonts. Finally, do not forget to specify an sans-serif class. */

References

Serif vs. sans serif

Font family: The 'font-family 'property