Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 01/07/08 17:10

Scripsit Adrienne Boswell:

> I inherited a website from my boss, who has Palantino on her computer.

I bet you mean "Palatino Linotype" (which is what you use later in your
message). Most of the readers here are humans, so it's not a big issue,
but those stupid computers don't really get these things. Actually, it
can be worse: some programs interpret misspelled font names according to
what they think the web page author meant, some don't.

> My default font is Comic Sans,

Good for you for some investigation purposes, since you'll immediately
see that some page is not setting font family or, in rare cases, setting
it to Comic Sans, for some odd reason. It's not that good for actual
browsing, especially if you are oriented towards actually reading texts
on web pages.

> Of course, now it's {font-family: "Palatino Linotype", "Times New
> Roman", Times, serif;}. I still only see Times New Roman, and
> personally, I liked it better with Comic Sans.

So you are suggesting that browsers primarily display your page using
Palatino Linotype but you haven't actually checked how they look like
when presented that way?

Including Times after Times New Roman sounds pointless. Hands up, has
someone ever seen a system _with_ Times but _without_ Times New Roman? A
system without either of them is imaginable, so the serif fallback makes
sense, _assuming_ that you have some reasonable reason for preferring a
serif font even against the user's choice of basic font.

Palatino Linotype is not very close to Times New Roman. Book Antiqua
would be a closer substitute, I think, and so would Georgia, if you
accept its lowercase ("old-style") digits. Times New Roman is more
condensed and looks smaller. I think the odds are that a system's
default serif font is _either_ Times New Roman _or_ something more
similar to Palatino Linotype than TNR is.

So I'd say that { font-family: "Palatino Linotype", serif; } is enough.

> So, the lesson here is to ALWAYS include a fallback and the
> appropriate generic font.

Is it? How many users actually select some _strange_ font as their
browser's default font? How many of them actually _want_ to see text in
that font when pages don't specify their own font?

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

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