Why is Heiti TC the default font in DT's HTML style?

DEVONthink
1

When I create a new, empty HTML, I see this in its source code:
<body style="margin:1.5em; font-family:'STHeitiTC-Light','Heiti TC'; font-size:13px">

AFAICT, STHeitiTC-Light and Heiti TC are fonts catering to Asian writing systems. But I don’t usually (in fact never) write Mandarin letters. So, why force this font on me?

Why not simply go with the user agent’s (aka browser) default style sheet or then one provided by the DT user?

A similar thing happens with conversion from Markdown to HTML, where also “Heiti TC” is set as the default font. And then the font-weight for h1, h2… is set to bold – which makes no sense, as there is no bold Heiti TC version (only light and semi-bold).

I’m on Sonoma (14.1.2, DT 3.9.4), and I can’t even disable the (for me) useless fonts anymore in Font Manager…

The fonts selected in DT’s preferences for “Web” have no influence here, nor does the font size. Those settings would seem to be the natural choices for default fonts, if there’s even a need to set them in the HTML style sheet.

Aside: Setting a font-size in the style (as is done here) is considered bad for accessibility. Even more so setting a font-size in px, as pixels have a different size on different devices. One can either not set the font-size or use a relative value like 100% or 1rem, respecting the default size set by the user.

2

DEVONthink doesn’t, that’s most likely just your default rich text font (see preferences).

3

Indeed. Wondering in what state of mind I was when I set that.

I didn’t even think to look there, as I never use RTF – wouldn’t it be more natural to employ the preferences for HTML fonts for HTML notes and conversion from MD?

4

The current behaviour is intentional to ensure consistency of Markdown, HTML pages, formatted notes and rich text. Even the internal Markdown stylesheet uses the rich text font.

5

I see. So the font setting in the HTML preferences is intended for websites that do not set their own fonts?
In that case, maybe renaming “RTF/Note font” to “Default font for all documents” (well, that’s far too long) might be helpful.

While I understand that you’re trying to achieve consistency, I’m not convinced that that’s a reasonable goal with HTML and MD: Both are more about structure (nowadays) than about representation. And there are accessibility concerns (see my first post) related to setting a font size in a HTML document. I’d prefer a clean separation between presentation oriented formats like RTF and others, where the presentation is delegated to CSS or a similar mechanism.

6

Yes, these are just the default settings for the WebKit.