The boundaries of the Web
When you use a font in a web page, it does appear as if the user has the same font installed on his computer.
You have no way of forcing the user to download and install a font, not even automatically.
You do not not warrant any fonts on the computer.
So you do not have any guarantee on how your page will be made in browsers.
It must therefore be “at best”, ie specify fonts (and hope they will be present), and specify other policyholders alternative names (if possible close to the one you want).
Example
For example, you want your page appears with the police “Trebuchet MS.” Specify then:
Font-family: “Trebuchet MS,” Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
By putting “Trebuchet MS” first, you note that you want the page is displayed with the police.
If the user has this policy, it will appear with.
If the user does not have this policy, the browser will try with each successive police following (Verdana, Arial …) to find one he owns.
Simply specify fonts that are graphically close to the font you want to use.
The types default
There are 3 types of default fonts that all browsers recognize:
Serif: Police wheelbase ( “Times New Roman” under Windows)
Sans-serif: Police sticks ( “Arial” under Windows)
MPV: Fixed-Space Font ( “Courier New” under Windows)
When you specify fonts to be used, it is fashionable to always specify one of these 3 generic fonts as a last resort.
Typically, as in our example above:
Font-family: “Trebuchet MS,” Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Sans-serif (police baton) is the police who will be closest to “Trebuchet MS” and will (in the worst case), have a page where the “look” is not too far from what you want .
The appearance of default fonts
Each operating system and browser interprets differently these fonts by default.
Serif: That’s “Times New Roman” in Windows, and the “Times” on the Macintosh (which is different from that of Windows).
Sans-serif: That of “Arial” in Windows, and “Helvetica” on the Macintosh.
MPV: “Courier New” in Windows, “Mail” on Macintosh, and often “VeraSans” or “DejaVuSans” under Linux.
Here is the aspect of these fonts in Windows (in Internet Explorer):
Same thing in Windows, but with ClearType enabled:
Under MacOS X (Safari):
Under Linux (Ubuntu) (in Firefox):
Recommendations
For fonts wheelbase, specify:
“Times New Roman”, Times, serif;
For fonts stick;
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
(Verdana a better readability on the screen qu’Arial, even if there are controversies over the use of this police).
For fixed-spaced fonts:
“Without DejaVu Mono,” “Without Bitstream Vera Mono,” monospace;
DejaVu and Vera are families of police opensource which allow very readable (unlike the horrible Courier) to distinguish between 0 and O’s of 1 l.
They are to be preferred to Courier as possible.
(They are present by default in most recent Linux distributions.)
(As long as it’s possible, avoid the police “Mail”.)
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