No good global UI font definition

[Mat Tomaszewski]

In LP's CSS there's no good, cross-OS font definition. CSS only states "sans-serif", which results in different font being displayed depending on the OS used (Vera Sans for Ubuntu, Arial for Mac OS).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

"sans-serif" *is* a good, cross-OS font definition: it lets the browser, and in some browsers (such as Firefox) the user, choose an appropriate sans-serif typeface for that OS.

A "different font being displayed depending on the OS used" is a natural consequence of Launchpad being a Web site: there is no single font that is installed by default in all three of Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. The only way to achieve a single font on all OSes would be to specify a font to be downloaded; but that would work only in Firefox 3.5+ and Safari 3.2+ and browsers of similar recency, and would achieve little except increasing download time and making pages with non-Latin characters (such as <https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/74838> for example) look worse because they would be mixing and matching more fonts than usual to show all the characters.

"sans-serif" does not result in Arial on Mac OS X; in both Safari and Firefox, it results in Helvetica. It does result in Arial on Windows, though, so I suggest making a surgical strike to use a nicer typeface on Windows without changing the typeface on Ubuntu or Mac OS X:

    font-family: "Candara", sans-serif;

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

The official CSS property is
    font-family: bitstream vera sans, dejavu sans, verdana, sans-serif;

Which might always be applied to body or *.