Mark E. Buckley

Choosing a font

When putting together your site, you will need to choose a font to display. The problem is that your viewers might not see the font you intended. This will depend on what computer they are using. Some fonts come built into their operating system. Therefore a visitor using an Apple might not see fonts that come built into a Windows operating system.

Users also will gain additional fonts if they have certain programs on their computer. If they have a word processing system, that program will automatically download certain fonts to their machine.

If the user's computer does not have the font you selected, then the web page will show with a default font.

When designing your site, use common fonts if possible. You can also select a list of fonts. The user's web browser will go through the list to see if one of the fonts is available. If it goes through the entire list it will just display the default font

Common Fonts

  • Arial
  • Courier New
  • Georgia
  • Times New Roman
  • Verdana
  • Comic Sans MS
  • Copperplate Gothic Bold
  • Copperplate Gothic Light
  • papyrus

Less Common Fonts - Not guaranteed to display.

  • baskerville
  • californian fb
  • chalkboard
  • futura
  • Garamond
  • gill sans regular
  • helvetica
  • hoefler text
  • Impact
  • Lucida Handwriting
  • Lucida Sans
  • Lucida Sans Unicode
  • monaco
  • News Gothic MT
  • OCR A Extended