Windows & Mac’s standard fonts
This is a necessary reference I use when designing webpages. Not everyone will see the same text design if your choice of fonts aren’t in user’s computer. Meaning everyone’s browser who visit your webpage will only use pre-installed fonts in their computers despite of your font collection in your system. There’s no way of knowing what font they have installed, but we can rely on standard fonts for both Windows and Mac.
The nice thing about CSS is the flexibility to control several values for font-family property. For instance, if you decide to use your own fonts, you can put your first choice of font if user has it on their computer. If not then the second choice of fonts would be next to display without messing up your layout. This makes the task a bit easier. Image fonts could work, but takes more time to upload and update information.
The information I gathered from goes to AmpSoft. Below are the common fonts on everyone’s computer.
| Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif |
| Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif |
| Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS5, cursive |
| Courier New, Courier New, Courier6, monospace |
| Georgia1, Georgia, serif |
| Impact, Impact5, Charcoal6, sans-serif |
| Lucida Console, Monaco5, monospace |
| Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif |
| Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua3, Palatino6, serif |
| Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif |
| Times New Roman, Times, serif |
| Trebuchet MS1, Helvetica, sans-serif |
| Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif |
| Symbol, Symbol (Symbol2, Symbol2) |
| Webdings, Webdings (Webdings2, Webdings2) |
| Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats (Wingdings2, Zapf Dingbats2) |
| MS Sans Serif4, Geneva, sans-serif |
| MS Serif4, New York6, serif |
1 Georgia and Trebuchet MS are bundled with Windows 2000/XP and they are also included in the IE font pack (and bundled with other MS applications), so they are quite common in Windows 98 systems.
2 Symbolic fonts are only displayed in Internet Explorer, in other browsers a font substitute is used instead (although the Symbol font does work in Opera and the Webdings works in Safari).
3 Book Antiqua is almost exactly the same font that Palatino Linotype, Palatino Linotype is included in Windows 2000/XP while Book Antiqua was bundled with Windows 98.
4 These fonts are not TrueType fonts but bitmap fonts, so they won’t look well when using some font sizes (they are designed for 8, 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 point sizes at 96 DPI).
5 These fonts work in Safari but only when using the normal font style, and not with bold or italic styles. Comic Sans MS works in bold but not in italic. Other Mac browsers seems to emulate properly the styles not provided by the font (thanks to Christian Fecteau for the tip).
6 These fonts are present in Mac OS X only if Classic is installed.
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