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I have been asked many times why people always use Times New Roman or Arial on their websites. Unfortunately, the reason is very simple. There are only a handful of fonts that look similar that are installed by default on both Windows and Macs. Consequently, these "browser safe fonts" find their way into almost every website out there. We've compiled an image from screen shots from a Windows machine and a Mac to show the browser safe fonts and how they compare on each platform.
The black text is Windows and the blue text is from a Mac.
As you can see, even the so called "similar" fonts don't always look the same. My statistics professor's motto "close enough is good enough" seems to be the stance I take on these font differences. Now, although you can define numerous font-family items in your style sheet, these can greatly change the way your page lays-out on different machines. I'm more for choosing one of the browser safe fonts and using it, so I don't have to worry (as much) about how everything will look to people on Macs.
Hopefully Windows, Apple, Linux, Unix, (any other *nix system) will learn to play nice and give the web designers in the world a bigger toolbox to play with. Until then, I think we should all get a little more comfy with Arial and Times New Roman.
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"Website Browser Safe Fonts"
Comments
2
AHFXStudios
Carol. More than likely the text that is in a different font that isn´t installed on her computer is coming from one of three ways.
- The "text" isn´t really text, but an image.
- The text has been embedded (normally this means larger file downloads) or is in a flash movie or the like where they embed the font into the animation.
- She doesn´t realize that that font is installed on her computer.
3
Other Fonts
Other fonts and their ubiquitous rates at http://www.3point7designs.com/blog/2008/05/08/8-fonts-you-probably-dont-use-in-css-but-should/
4
Alvin
How can I use the font kunsler script on a Yola site, also, can I add window media player safely? Thanks
5
Craig Painter
Thanks for sharing the list above, just what I was looking for. Looking for web fonts, I came across this article, seems it could be the end of fixed web fonts with HTML5 :-)
http://www.broken-links.com/2009/05/28/exciting-times-html-5-web-fonts/
6
Lars
What you see is just a different system settings of the fonts. In Windows the standard font settings are whithout anti-aliasing of the fonts. It´s easy to adjust the computer settings on your computer but most of the windows users don´t know this. The display of fonts is can be set without the bitmap kind a style. The edges are softend, also in other applications. Check the help on your specific system. I can´t understand why this setting isn´t standard in windows.
7
Kyle Deming
As web designers I think we need to understand that despite our desire to control exactly how our website designs look, we can´t control everything. Thanks for the resource.
8
anil kukadiya
Yes i am also totally agree with that. Sometime you might be confused about what font should you use for your website. And at later stage google come with another stylish fonts. I would also stick with windows default installed fonts like Times New Roman, Arial
9
Xps
Using the CSS3 font-face rule, the reader can download the new font automatically. Like usual, Internet Explorer is behind and doesn´t yet support it. You can find more information at www.w3schools.com/css3/css3_fonts.asp
10
govanus
I was intrested in the comments you put about non-preloaded fonts being only from the 3 sources as a picture, embeded in flash or other player or simply being in the machine and not being seen before.
This jarred a bit with my experieance of using chinese, corean and japanese sites before the widespread loading of Asiatic fonts on european computers. There was aperiod when machines that had no capability to use a supporting font could suddenly render perfect ideographic characters on some pages and then a complete mess in other parts. At first you would imagine that they where using pictures but some messing about with the Source viewer showed that they were running text strings in either a local charcter set like euc- or in some forms of unicode encodeings.
It seemed that either css or more likely a little bit of java type script ran a special browser built-in system to download special web fonts and then use them (a multi-file html version of embeding fonts in PDF´s and word files).
Although I didn´t learn enough java often bilinugaly writen to understand it well: the company name Bitstream did crop up as a souce of the "technology".
If you are wanting to introduce downloadable fonts that check them to see if they still have any infomation about it and then just incorperate the codes stated into your pages.
11
SEO Orlando
Thanks for the great blog post! This blog is truly interactive. I appreciate all the work you’ve been doing. Good stuff. This is exactly what i was looking for. Keep up the good work.
1
Carol
I reminded someone I work with to use browser safe fonts on her website. She asked me today why she can see fonts on some websites that she knows she doesn´t have installed on her computer. Is that possible? If she wants fancy fonts on her website and she downloads them, aren´t the viewers going to see one of the fonts above as a replacement?