[Spliff]

Newbie questions:

Which fonts are installed both on PCs and Macs? For instance, I've got Courier and Courier New on my system. Courier New is an MS font. So is Courier installed by default on PCs, as well?

The reason I ask is because I really hate Courier New and would rather use Courier. I disabled Courier New and discovered that several websites/blogs that I visit now look a helluva lot better. They were using Courier New which looks thin and washed out. With Courier New disabled, the website font is using Courier and looks much, much better: darker, bolder, more readable.

If I use Courier or Times in a website instead of their MS counterparts, which Window's machines display the website in Time and/or Courier or Times New Roman and Courier New?

[Oisín]

I'm not sure I understand your question completely, but if you're asking what I think you're asking, there's something else you can do altogether: multiple font declarations.

In your CSS file, when you specify the font to use, you can specify more than one font. That way, if the first font is not installed on the user's system, the second on the list will be used, etc. The list should always end with a generic font such as serif, sans-serif, monospace, etc.

Example:

body { font: Courier, Courier New, Modern, Zallihalliho, monospace; }

This will use Courier on your machine, because you have Courier installed. On systems where Courier is not installed, it will look for Courier New; if this is not found, it will look for Modern; if this is not found, it will look instead for Zallihalliho; when this is not found (which it almost 100% certainly won't be, 'cause I just made up the name), it will simply use the default monospace font on that system.

Edit: If you only declare one font, e.g. Courier, on a system where Courier is not installed, the browser will use the default font, on most Windows systems Times New Roman (unless the user has specified another font in his browser settings).

Double-edit: Why would anyone want to use Courier for a website anyway? It's the ugliest font in the world, only usable for code and other stuff that needs to be monospace.

[Simon Mundy]

Just being picky, but you need to escape font names with spaces in them by enclosing them with quotes in css:

body { font-family: Courier, "Courier New", Modern, Zallihalliho, monospace; }

[Phil Sherry]

I want a font called Zallihalliho, now. Grr.

[Millennium]

When you specify the precedence order of fonts to use on a site, it's not hard to come up with versions that look great on Macs (and Windows machines which have the fonts) and fall back to the older corresponding Windows fonts if necessary. Consider some of the following combinations:

Times, "Times New Roman", serif;
Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
Courier, "Courier New", monospace;

For the record, my favorite Web font is Marty Pfeffer's Nu Sans (shareware, but the demo is good enough to give it a try). I've made it my default browser font, and it's almost perfect. My one qualm is that it doesn't look as good for large headlines as Helvetica, even though I much prefer it for body text. That's easy enough to solve with CSS, though.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Simon Mundy

Just being picky, but you need to escape font names with spaces in them by enclosing them with quotes in css:

body { font-family: Courier, "Courier New", Modern, Zallihalliho, monospace; }

Oops, sorry, my bad!

Millennium - Nu Sans looks pretty good, but the demo version seems to have some not-so-great kerning, and the numbers look like they're Bitmap (ie. very grainy). Is that different in the registered version? How about character mapping, how extensive is it?

[Spliff]

Thanks for the replies. You guys answered my confusing question. I was half-drunk when I wrote it and it's not entirely coherent.

[Spliff]

Originally Posted by Oisín

Double-edit: Why would anyone want to use Courier for a website anyway? It's the ugliest font in the world, only usable for code and other stuff that needs to be monospace.

Some sites seem to use it when they're trying to get that old-style typewriter look. And it's easy to read, I guess.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Oisín

Oops, sorry, my bad!

Millennium - Nu Sans looks pretty good, but the demo version seems to have some not-so-great kerning, and the numbers look like they're Bitmap (ie. very grainy). Is that different in the registered version? How about character mapping, how extensive is it?

The numbers are better in the registered version; I can say that for certain. I'll need to look at the kerning a bit more closely to compare, as I haven't used the demo version in a long time.

[Oisín]

Here:

[registered_user]

I presume you know what fonts to expect on a Mac.

Here is what to expect on Winders.

[jay3ld]

if you are going to want to trick the system and get the fonts to work make a picture of the words you are using in that special font. use something like fireworks of adobe i suggest and just type it and make it a jpg and use that.

[Spliff]

Originally Posted by registered_user

I presume you know what fonts to expect on a Mac.

Here is what to expect on Winders.

Thanks. That's a very useful link.

[Oisín]

Over 1/5 of Windows users manage to hack their way to deleting Times New Roman? I find that hard to believe...

[jay3ld]

Are you sure it just isnt a virus they are getting instead ?

[selowitch]

Man, typography on the web stick sucks!!! If you want your website to be truly interoperable/cross-platform, you still have the same crummy palette of fonts that you count on to be available: Arial, Helvetica, Times, Verdana, Georgia, Geneva, and that's just about it.

For example, I may be able to specify Lucida Bright on my website, but I have to have a fallback to one of those loser fonts listed about or finally, at the end of my list, specify serif or sans-serif for the font-family attribute. Yeech! I hate that.

I hope someday soon it will be possible/practical to host the fonts on your webserver (via some kind of server-side action) so you can at last have control over what typeface your website displays in, for Pete's sake.

Either that, or bring on CSS3!

BTW, Anybody seen my rant about the lack of suppport for such things as fractions in Unicode?

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Oisín

Over 1/5 of Windows users manage to hack their way to deleting Times New Roman? I find that hard to believe...

If I recall correctly, TNR is the default font in most Windows browsers. Most likely the users see no difference between stuff that's explicitly specified as TNR and the default, and so they assume (as is true for the other fonts) that they don't have it. Honestly, that's a pretty bad hole in their survey methodology.

[Oisín]

So, users fill in a 'form' of what fonts they have installed, themselves? And they simply do this by being shown a sample of text - “Is this text Arial Black?”? If they do... that's ridiculous. They should have some better way of doing it, like having an image of the text in the right font, and then ask, “Does this text look identical to the picture to the left?” or something...

As far as I know, you can't delete fonts 1-7, 9, 12-17, 19 (and more; I just didn't bother counting further) on that list without some kind of hack. I tried to get rid of Slimes New Roman, which I loathe and despise; unfortunately, it just told me that “this font is a system font and may not be deleted”, whereupon I just resigned never to use it again, and generally ignore its existence. Equally effective (almost).

[eggman]

Remember embedded fonts? It's too bad it never took off.

Back in the day, Netscape and IE had competing embedded font technologies (Embedded Open Type .EOT files vs. TrueDoc .PFR files), but it was possible to use both of them on the same page... and only the relevant one would get downloaded. For an extra 16-32K, you got the typography you wanted on your sites.

My first professional site used Century Gothic as the body text and pretty much everybody was able to see it because the only browsers of note were IE and Netscape.

Back when the world was young.

So... how long before we see ubiquitous CSS 3 support? I should live so long.

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by eggman

Remember embedded fonts? It's too bad it never took off.

Such a simple and good idea, why the hell wasn't it universally implemented??!!

I'm very sorry; I hit the Edit button instead of Reply by mistake. It was not my intent to edit this post. I hope I've got the original right. -Millennium

[spacefreak]

Originally Posted by selowitch

I hope someday soon it will be possible/practical to host the fonts on your webserver (via some kind of server-side action) so you can at last have control over what typeface your website displays in, for Pete's sake.

Or simply have them embedded within the content downloaded from the website (like favicons), and then rendered within the browser... similar in a way to how PDF files embed their fonts.

[spacefreak]

[QUOTE=eggman]Remember embedded fonts? It's too bad it never took off.

Originally Posted by selowitch

Such a simple and good idea, why the hell wasn't it universally implemented??!!

I just posted above before I read these. It seems ridiculous that embedded fonts didn't catch on.

It looks like some folks determined that there was no way to make money from the technology, and perhaps font companies like Adobe started piping up about looking for royalties.

I think we flat-out just have to demand it from the browser makers, which means that a current, well-designed and implemented solution needs to be ready.

This is going to be a tough one.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by selowitch

Such a simple and good idea, why the hell wasn't it universally implemented??!!

The usual junk; patents, licensing fees, and two competing standards.

This said, SVG has its own scalable-font specification, and converters already exist for TrueType fonts (I'm not sure about Type 1). If more browsers implement SVG natively, then this concept may yet catch on.

The big disadvantage to SVG's fonts is that they cannot be hinted, which essentially makes them equivalent to the old Type 3 fonts. However, I'm forced to wonder how much of a problem this actually is, given that one would hope the main use for custom fonts would be in headers and other large text.

[eggman]

Check this out...

This is an interesting technology: it doesn't cover body text, but it enables the dynamic use of arbitrary fonts in header text using JavaScript, CSS & Flash. It degrades elegantly for those who don't have Flash... or those who have the appropriate fonts installed!

Here's the sample page...

[registered_user]

I don't care for SIFR because I had an issue with it and FireFox's adblock.

Here's a screenie:
http://roo.clubhouse54.com/adblock.gif

There should be a headline where the type "AdBlock" is. I find that image replacement -- dynamic or otherwise -- is a better solution, albeit less geeky.

[Cory Bauer]

Why is Helvetica completely absent from the list of most common Windows fonts? Am I that dense that I never knew PCs don't have Helvetica?

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

Why is Helvetica completely absent from the list of most common Windows fonts? Am I that dense that I never knew PCs don't have Helvetica?

Some PCs have it -many might have it by now- but it's never been a standard font on Windows, because of licensing issues. Arial was developed as a kind of clone, though it never really got it right.

[Cory Bauer]

Wow, I feel like I just found out there's no Santa Claus.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Millennium

Some PCs have it -many might have it by now- but it's never been a standard font on Windows, because of licensing issues. Arial was developed as a kind of clone, though it never really got it right.

Swiss comes closer to reproducing Helvetica than Arial does, though (Arial is just plain fugly). But, as you say, many PC's have Helvetica now, as well.