This page let you test the rendering font-family declaration for monospaced fonts. TODO: add some references here :-)
Erwin Dokter had the following explanation on Bugzilla #33496:
By default, a (Windows) browser has it's default font-sizes set at 16px for serif and sans-serif, and 13px for monospace. Except in IE, where you cannot set any font-sizes... it uses 16px for all fonts.
Vector has a base font-size of 0.8em, and most browsers *correctly* scale down all fonts, including the monospace font, accordingly. So monospace is shown at 0.8 x 13px = 10px (which is perceived as 'too small'). But when you assign any font besides just "monospace", those browsers will no longer treat it as monospace and use 0.8 x 16px = 13px instead.
Additionally, it seems that textareas have their own font-size set in Chrome (but not Firefox and other browsers), making them unaffected by this behavior.
Below are various rendering:
<pre> | <textarea> |
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font-family: monospace; |
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font-family: "Courier New"; |
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font-family: Courier; |
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font-family: monospace, monospace; |
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font-family: monospace, "Courier New"; |
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font-family: monospace, Courier; |
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font-family: monospace, Verdana; |
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font-family: monospace, DOESNOTEXISTREALLY; |