I never really thought about this function in the vb code till I just ran across another poster using the georgia font.
What other fonts can I play with?
The SBMB uses, in no particular order:
[ul]
[li]Trebuchet MS[/li][li]Arial[/li][li]Tahoma[/li][li]Verdana[/li][li]geneva[/li][li]lucida[/li][li]‘lucida grande’[/li][li]arial[/li][li]helvetica[/li][li]sans-serif[/li][/ul]
Not all fonts are available in all areas of the SDMB.
^Those are the fonts the forum uses in its CSS for its own design/text, Duckster. The OP is asking about the fonts available for posts, I believe.
When creating a new thread, or when you choose the “Reply” button instead of the “Quick Reply” option (or select “Advanced” beneath the Quick Reply form), you should get the full version of the editor, which has a dropdown with the following available fonts:
[ul]
[li]Arial[/li][li]Arial Black[/li][li]Arial Narrow[/li][li]Book Antiqua[/li][li]Century Gothic[/li][li]Comic Sans MS[/li][li]Courier New[/li][li]Fixedsys[/li][li]Franklin Gothic Medium[/li][li]Garamond[/li][li]Georgia[/li][li]Impact[/li][li]Lucida Console[/li][li]Lucida Sans Unicode[/li][li]Microsoft Sans Serif[/li][li]Palatino Linotype[/li][li]System[/li][li]Tahoma[/li][li]Times New Roman[/li][li]Trebuchet MS[/li][li]Verdana[/li][/ul]
Of course if you don’t have these fonts on your system, you won’t get these exact fonts.
You can in principle use any font, if you type out the tags by hand. Whether people will be able to see it as you intended depends entirely on what they have on their system, and not at all on anything about the SDMB itself (though the list in the drop-down is probably a pretty good selection of fonts likely to be on many computers). For instance, if you have Wingdings installed, then this: 6 will look like an hourglass, even though Wingdings isn’t on the SDMB editor’s GUI list.
Use Papyrus, the beloved font of yoga studios and organic free-range fair-trade locally sourced foodstuff labels, to give your posts that wise, crunchy one-with-the-Earth look. Even Hitler quotes will read like wise Eastern proverbs when they’re in Papyrus. Example:
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
Words to live by. So wise. So deep. Let us meditate upon them.
And, unfortunately, there’s no way to pick a backup font. I’ve tried. I thought you could do it in HTML with nested font tags, but, if you can, it doesn’t work here.
I sit corrected. I bow to those with a greater font of knowledge than me. I guess I was the wrong type.
choie, thanks, I see the drop down font selection now.
elmwood, that was hilarious, but what should I use if I want my posts to read like the lady in the office newsletter who writes about how funny her cats are?
HTML tags were turned off several years ago after some random asshole thought it would be funny to use them to hack the board.
Hmm…no it doesn’t. And I have Wingdings installed, and I just verified the hourglass by typing 6 in notepad.
It’s coming out as a 6 in some different font…a thin sans-serif.
That was in firefox…it works in Chrome.
I thought it was funny anyway. 
Members should be aware that Firefox 4 in some circumstances (the computer gods alone know how and why) can have problems with the Helvetica font, used extensively on the SDMB. Mozilla have acknowledged the bug but it’s one of the most difficult kind to iron out, ie it doesn’t affect all FF4 users and it doesn’t affect all webpages.
About a week ago the nice crisp font on the SDMB front page vanished to be replaced by some pale fuzzy interloper. No way I could put up with that monstrosity so when I couldn’t fix it I simply set Chrome to use SDMB as its home page and fired up that each time I came here. Not an ideal solution but better than any alternative short of a complete fix.
That’s because Firefox is following the standard while Chrome isn’t. Non-alphabetic fonts are not supposed to be usable.
I was referring to the vBulletin font tags, as compared with the HTML ones. Though, come to think of it, the HTML font tags may not be nestable either. The vBulletin font tags create teh HTML ones, despite the fact that the HTML font tag is now deprecated. Maybe that’s part of why they are deprecated.
Any fuzzy/blurry font problems should be easy to fix. Just disable hardware acceleration in the options. The old software font rendering hasn’t changed, AFAIK.
And the SDMB uses Helvetica? Checks source Well, yeah, if you don’t have Verdana, Geneva, Lucida, Lucida Grande, or Arial. It’s the last backup font before going with your browsers default sans-serif font. Everyone should have Lucida (Grande) and Arial unless they are using Linux or some really old OS. (older than XP, at least.)
Quoth Lute Skywatcher:
You’re dating yourself, there. The “several years ago” when that happened was about six months after the board came online, and was when we were using a completely different message board software (UBB instead of vBulletin). It’s highly likely that that vulnerability has been fixed, and I’m not even sure that vBulletin allows the use of naked HTML code, anyway. If it does, it would probably be safe for the administrators to turn it on, but I can very well understand that they don’t like to play guinea pig.
Quoth BigT:
Huh, I didn’t know that. Is that implemented via a list of known alphabetic fonts, or a list of known non-alphabetic fonts? If I invented a new font called ChronoType (which Firefox would not know whether it was alphabetic), and I and a friend both installed it on our computers, and I made a webpage with <font=“ChronoType”> on it, would my friend see the font?
I think it’s a flag in the font itself. So you could probably make a non alphabetic font as long as you “lied” and called it an alphabetic font. There may also be a list of fonts for older ones that didn’t use the mark–I don’t know.
The idea is for accessibility, I believe. Graphics should be graphics files, with alt text to tell screen readers what the graphics are if they are important. Having the screen reader give, say, a k for a smiley face is not useful.