If I’d like to play around with different fonts on this board for instance, how do I know which fonts I can safely assume everyone has regardless of operating system? Is there a list of “safe” fonts someplace?
For example, I’m pretty sure everyone has courier. So, to use courier I’d use the font tag thusly: [fønt=courier]I want this to be courier[/font], and I’d get this: I want this to be courier.
(I spelled font wrong on purpose to get the code to show up. [noparse] doesn’t seem to work here.)
So many programs install their own fonts I’m not sure what’s safe to use. There’s a drop-down list of fonts we can select from the reply window here on the board. Are those the only safe ones?
Apologies if this is better suited to ATMB or someplace.
Macintosh System 3-4 tended to come stock with Chicago, Courier, Geneva, Helvetica, Monaco, and Times. That was it. (And it was still considered miles and away more ‘fontastic’ than the competing MS-DOS).
PCs don’t come with Helvetica (they have Arial, a Helvetica ripoff, instead). Macs, meanwhile, won’t necessarily always have Arial (the newer ones will though).
Most computers have Times New Roman but older Macs will only have Times (not the exact same font).
I don’t know if all computers have Courier; do any modern flavors have only Courier New?
Verdana is common nowadays but again you won’t find it on old Macs.
People have set their browser to display text in the font & point size that they prefer. Yet you are going to come along and over-ride their preference to force your choice of font on them? How rude!
I have a near-blind friend who has to carefully set fonts, point sizes, and colors to be able to read the screen. She frequently reports webpages that over-ride her settings, and end up making their page unreadable for her.
What are you trying to accomplish by this, anyway?
You can pretty safely assume that if you stick with Courier, Arial and Times that everyone will be able to see more or less the same thing, with fairly minor differences showing up in spacing and layout.
Browers are generally doing a good job of handling font substitutions - if a page was made on a Mac, for example, and the coding is for Helvetica, the browser on a PC will substitute Arial. As a fall-back to that, nearly every computer has some sort of default sans-serif face.
If you stray from the Big Three, the substitution gets a little trickier, but still usually works out. As a real-world example, this page’s style sheet contains a font reference of font: 11px verdana, geneva, lucida, ‘lucida grande’, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; Sooner or later, your browser is going to say “Aha! We have that!”
We already have the ability to select from a variety of fonts, styles, colors, and sizes from within the reply window. If this is “overriding someone’s preferences” and “rude” to you, take it to the pit.
I’m not planning on making all my posts purple, size 1 for crying out loud. Yesterday was Halloween and it occurred to me it might be mildly amusing to put a word or two in some sort of gothic-looking font but I have no idea which gothic-looking font on my computer would display properly on other peoples’ computers.
Is the occasional post like this offensive to you?
Everyone else will probably see Arial/Helvetica unless you pick a face that came bundled with a popular application that you’re hoping your target audience has purchased.
There’s not a single “gothic” typeface on this PC as my employer has only provided us with about 15 basic faces, most of which came with Windows.