4 ms·

I'm a bit confused about the use of "just give me a system font", then several named fonts and then "sans-serif". Isn't that exactly what "sans-serif" does, giv

• dot 11y ago
  How does a system know wether a font is sans-serif or not?
  • rogeryu 11y ago
    That's a setting in the browser, not the system.
  • lottin 11y ago
    The 'sans-serif' font is an alias for the default sans-serif font, which is simply a system setting just like the default browser or the default whatever. Therefore the system doesn't need to know which fonts are sans-serif and which aren't.
  • drivers99 11y ago
    It's a browser setting. For example, I'm using Firefox 41 on Windows 7 and in Options->Content->Fonts&Colors/Advanced... it has "Times New Roman", "Arial", and "Courier New" as the defaults for Serif, Sans-serif, and Monospace respectively. In Chrome, it's under Settings->+Show advanced settings->Web content/Customize fonts... (Times New Roman, Arial, Consolas on mine.) In IE 11 under Tools (gear icon)->General->Appearance/Fonts it has "Webpage font" and "Plain text font" (Times New Roman and Courier New on mine). It's weird that they don't let you pick the default sans-serif font.
  • TimJYoung 11y ago
    On Windows you can query for information about any font using the Windows API. This call allows you to enumerate fonts based upon their name, etc: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd162620(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd1... and the callback function used with it will get you this structure: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd145037(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd1... and the lfPitchAndFamily member will tell you what type of font it is.
  • wmil 11y ago
    TTF / OTF fonts have quite a bit of meta data in them. I don't know the details but there are some flags regarding font family.
• igravious 11y ago
  "sans-serif" gives you the _browser's_ default sans-serif font, not the system font (which is generally (always?) sans-serif).