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Why can’t you have a specific font on my website?
Outside of the web world we see hundreds of different typefaces everyday. In magazines, postcards, business cards, and even menus at our favorite local restaurant. It seems natural to assume that you could use any font of your choosing on the Internet. However, this is not the case.
When designing web pages, unfortunately web designers are limited to the fonts installed universally on everyone’s computer. Standardized fonts carry through all types of computers, operating systems, and internet browsers. Although you may specify any font you wish, if it is not a common font chances are that only your computer will be able to display the font.
Unfortunately, at the moment there aren't very many options if you absolutely must have a specific font on your webpage. The most common option is making the text an image. Although this solution is acceptable for small portions of text on a website, such as headings that don't change often.
The major downfall of using this technique on an entire website is that it makes the content of you website invisible to search engines. This is quite possibly the worst thing you can do for your search engine results.
Having said that, you do have font options on the web, although limited. The below chart will show you the most common and safest fonts to use for your website:
- In some cases the Mac equivalent is the same font, since Mac OS X also includes some of the
fonts shipped with Windows.
- The notes at the bottom contains specific information about some of the fonts.
Windows fonts / Mac fonts / Font family
| style |
| 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 |
