Font: poor vertical metrics cause inconsistent line-height rendering across browsers. Solution?

Question

After hours of debugging and pottering around I found out that it is impossible to vertically align a font with poor vertical metrics consistently across browsers.

Answer 1

It took me a while, but I just found out that my font distributor lets me configure fonts before download. I was able to add "Line Height Adjustments" to the font. These were the available options:

Line Height Adjustments

• Best (Use the best method to normalize the line height for this font)
• 120% (Redefine the line height as 120% of the point size)
• Automatic (Distributes OS/2.Typo values across ascender, descender and line gap)
• Bounding Box (Match the bounding box of the glyphs, line gap will always be 0)
• Native (Use the line height as defined in the font, results may differ between browsers)

The "Bounding Box" option did the trick. Now "Segoe Print" is nicely adjusted.

Whenever I face this problem again I will either use the fontsquirrel generator for free fonts or purchase a font from a distributor that offers an option to adjust the line heights right out of the box...