Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 11/23/07 07:32

Scripsit Toby A Inkster:

>> I would like the look of our website to be somewhat distinct and not
>> just use arial or times fonts. Is there a list of less-used fonts
>> that are widely available on almost all client computers?
>
> Tahoma, Trebuchet are good options.

I have to disagree.

Tahoma is essentially just a condensed version of Verdana, so it has the
drawbacks of Verdana _and_ it is too dense. It might be useful for some
special purposes (e.g. as font for simple IPA notations, due to its
relatively good character coverage) but hardly for copy text.

Trebuchet MS is partly too dense, too, and it has poor implementation of
letters with diacritic marks (like ä, é, ô) in common sizes like 12pt.
It also has the en dash almost the same as the hyphen, and too big
quotation marks. (They are curly, contrary to the poor quotes in Tahoma,
but the designers didn't manage to design quotes that match the design
of the letters - quotes stand out too much.)

There's no good answer for "almost all client computers", as we can see
e.g. from the summary
http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResults.shtml

Palatino Linotype might be an improvement over Times New Roman, due to
better readability on screen. But it's partly _too_ spaced, and setting
letter-spacing doesn't help, since some character pairs are too
condensed. Georgia has many nice features, like text figures (i.e.,
lowercase digits), but the features might be drawbacks too, and
Georgia's coverage is below 90%, so that the "almost all" condition is
not fulfilled.

Something like

body { font-family: Calibri, Gill Sans, Gill Sans MT, sans-serif; }

might work relatively well, if you prefer a nice and simple sans-serif
design, suitable for reading on screen. Many people will see the page in
their browser's default sans-serif font, which is not that bad, and
probably a better guess than just throwing in Arial somewhere. After
all, what would make us think that Arial is an improvement over the
browser's meaning for sans-serif?

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]