third font in font family is significantly larger

Question

For my website I have chosen to use some pretty obscure fonts in my font family. The most well known font (3rd in family) is Century Gothic, which most computers have.

Answer 1

I think the issue is the relatively tall x-height of Century Gothic. Try using ex units in your font-size declaration. ex units are based on height, unlike em, px, and pt.

Setting the line-height to a pixel size would also help normalize the height, but would cause problems for users who change the text zoom level in their browser.

Edit: I went back and tested, and ex units don't help. Century Gothic is both taller and wider than the others.

The issue is, the DOM will not allow you to tell which specific font the user has from your listed alternates, and CSS doesn't allow separate font sizes (or adjustments) for each font.

However, JQuery can test the size of a container of text. So, if you provide a hidden element on your page with a known letter in it, you can test the width of that element on the user's browser.

Since the width of that letter will be determined by which font the user has installed, you can compare that width to the width of the same text in your preferred font on your own computer and compute a font size for the user that roughly matches what you intended.

Example code:

Your text goes here.
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