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Android phones do not have Arial nor Arimo. I tested a simple page with "font-family: Arial, Arimo, serif" and got a serif font. That’s may be true for Firefox
by strenholme 4y ago
Android phones do not have Arial nor Arimo. I tested a simple page with "font-family: Arial, Arimo, serif" and got a serif font.
That’s may be true for Firefox on Android, which has, as per caniuse.com, a 0.28% global usage share. Chrome for Android, which has a 40.28% usage share (well over 100 times the users as Firefox/Android) shows things without serif.
There’s also a number of uniwidth typefaces which do not get wider in their bold form, for GUI elements which need to stay the same size (a use case which we should not completely dismiss as bad design), but those need to be downloaded as .woff/.woff2 fonts.
- Kwpolska 4y agoI re-tested with Chrome, and got Roboto, which is clearly not Arial nor Arimo and is not metric-compatible. And it was triggered by the name Arial.
- strenholme 4y agoI have reproduced your results. It looks like Android made the move to using Arimo for Arial to using Roboto fairly recently; the Arial trick worked with my older 2017/2018 Android smart phone. Unfortunate too; there is no longer any universal font stack which preserves metrics. The only option now to preserve metrics is to have users download a fairly large .woff/.woff2 font. Large is relative; the 116,472 bytes my font stack needs has five fonts: Roman, bold, italic, sans serif bold, and sans serif bold small caps. Mind you, this only supports English and Spanish, but it does have smart quotes, an em dash, and other typographic characters: “”‘’— etc. Then again, 116,472 bytes is a drop in the bucket in an era when people by and large consume video content online.