web safe fonts

[Ian Hurst (Troyka)]

is there a list of web safe standard fonts?
ones that will work on every computer (well almost every)

 

[SpaceGirl]

is there a list of web safe standard fonts?
ones that will work on every computer (well almost every)
--------------------------
Youth Work Resources
the youth work website
http://www.youthworker.org.uk
--------------------------

See the post above

 

[Dylan Parry]

See the post above

Quote:

"I guess Arial is the most striking of the web fonts you can use. All the
other fonts which are available for web sites (pretty much: arial, times,
courier, verdana, tahoma) are too um.. curly. You cant use any other fonts
because you can't guarantee people have them installed on their machines."
-- SpaceGirl

Just in case the post above is not above

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

is there a list of web safe standard fonts?
ones that will work on every computer (well almost every)

serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, monospace. Anything else is just a
guess.

 

[Mark Parnell]

Just in case the post above is not above

Indeed. It's below here (and there are a couple of posts in between).

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, monospace. Anything else is
just a guess.

Actually, the generic fonts are even more of a guess. If you set
font to Arial, you are in principle referring to a specific font family
you can know. The browser may ignore your <font face="Arial"> or
font-family: Arial, of course. When you set font-family: sans-serif,
you are, by definition, asking the browser use the "typical" sans-serif
that _it_ chooses (maybe as instructed by the user). And
unfortunately browsers do this rather poorly, with sometimes
strange ideas of "typical". Besides, in reality, you are also asking
for browser bugs - they have some oddities in handling declarations
with generic font names.

Setting fonts is tricky. Typography is difficult, and the Web as an
environment is in many ways hostile to typography. There's very little
we can do with any safety.

Here's a simple approach (in CSS):

@media screen { body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } }
@media print { body { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; }
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, caption {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } }

This shouldn't do much harm, and it probably improves the overall
appearance on the average.

For pages with more or less literary content (as opposite to
technical), font-family: Georgia for copy text might work well - it's
nice both on screen and on paper, and it's fairly widely available. And
when it's not, the browser default is probably at least tolerable.

 

[Dylan Parry]

Indeed. It's below here (and there are a couple of posts in between).

There is of course the fact that the post was also not 100% accurate, but
I shan't go into that now

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Actually, the generic fonts are even more of a guess. If you set
font to Arial, you are in principle referring to a specific font family
you can know.

Even that's guess-work I'm afraid.

The Arial that comes with AbiWord is quite different from the Arial that
comes with, say, Windows.