Fonts You Should Use On The Web

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

When you use your computer, you may notice that there are some fonts included by default. However, not all these fonts should be used on the internet. Only those that are shared among all computers, the PCs, the macs.

For example, if you specify your font as Calibri, a quite well-known font that's default only among vista machines, a mac user or a XP user viewing the website won't be able to see the text in Calibri.

So, I want to point out about the fonts that are common in all computers, and they are known as web safe fonts.

Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS, cursive

Courier New, Courier New, Courier, monospace

Georgia, Georgia, serif

Impact, Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif

Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace

Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif

Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif

Times New Roman, Times, serif

Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif

Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif

Some fonts on windows are similar to the fonts in macs, but they have different names. To overcome this problem, you can use priorities in CSS. For example:

font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', Textile, cursive

So, when checking for the font to use, the viewer's computer will check for 'Comic Sans MS', then check Textile.

But if all of the fonts are absent due to an unknown reason, it will use cursive, which is the family of font 'Comic Sans MS' and Textile. This family is required to be inclued in any web browser that accepts CSS, even if the machine doesn't has the font. Together, there are 5 classes of web-fonts:

sans-serif, serif, monospace, fantasy

Labels: Web Design

posted by text21 @ 1:23 PM : Go to top