A Web Safe Fonts – Part 2

Foster Fosters   – Raleigh, NC
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

A Web Safe Fonts – Part 2

In this continue I do continue to discuss and expound on web safe fonts.

When should one use web safe fonts?

As a general rule, one should always use Web safe fonts for his page’s content.

Where does one apply web safe fonts?

Ones plain text headers, links, and other content ought all to use Web safe fonts. If one plans to use normal text for his logo, he should also use a font that is Web safe for that. In fact, one of the few exceptions to one using fonts that are Web safe is if one decides to use text in his images. If one plans to use images for some of his text, then it is always safe to use other fonts as images will appear the same on the web visitor’s computer just the way it does on ones own. However, one should never use images for all of his text. One should note that images for text should be sparingly used. Logos as well as some headers may also use images. Everything that is content or otherwise normal text, although, should just use a font that is Web safe.

How does one use web safe fonts and which fonts are safe?

One should include Web safe fonts in his CSS with font or font-family rules.

There are a very good number of Web safe fonts. Many of them do look very similar to other fonts that are Web safe, and in practice they are usually essentially the same. A CSS rule for ones font family may look like this, for example:

Font-family: Arial, sans-serif, Helvetica;

The first font listed, Arial, is a very common font that is available on most computers, so one can actually safely bet that it will not fail to show up properly on a visitor’s screen when he visits ones site. In very rare cases, a computer may have Arial not installed, however. Take an example; older Apple computers may not have Arial, and several other fonts. Although, Helvetica is widely installed among many Apple computers, and it closely resembles Arial, so Helvetica is usually listed second but note here I have listed it third for some other personal reasons. When a browser is not able to find the first font that is listed, it goes ahead to look for the next fonts in that order. In the case above, sans-serif will be used when Arial is not found to be installed.

And in very extremely rare cases, some computers may not have both Arial and sans-serif installed. In such a case, “Helvetica” is then used. This is just a fallback, a font that is default that the Web browser will use if it will not find any of the fonts that were previously listed.

There are usually four types or families of fonts that are considered Web safe: sans-serif, serif, monospace and cursive. Each of these fonts has its own fallback font. The fallbacks for each family, respectively, are: sans-serif, serif, monospace and cursive. One will find that font rules always almost do include one of these fallbacks, and always last.

The fonts are usually listed in the CSS format so one can easily copy and paste them if he does not feel like typing them out. This is likely how one will be seeing the fonts almost all the time, anyway.

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