Fonts of Knowledge
Dear Editors:
I read Molly's November "Integrated Design" article [see Web Techniques, November 1999] and need to clarify something that she glanced over: fonts as used in Web-page body content.
Typography on the Net is a lot more limited than Molly makes it out to be. She appears to be focusing on users of Windoze computers. There are many users of Mac and UNIX platforms. Combine all users, and type choices come down to basically nothing.
Let me explain. In Table 3, Molly lists the popular sans-serif types as Helvetica and Arial. In the world of the Net, those are the only choices, and they must be used together in a Web page. Why? Because, based upon default installation of the three major operating systems, Windoze only has Arial, Mac and UNIX have Helvetica. If you use only Arial on your page, that text will appear in Courier when viewed on a UNIX computer. This means your Web page, so carefully laid out, will look like crap. And with Linux users increasing by leaps and bounds, the last thing you want is your Web page to look bad.
There is a generic cure, which unfortunately too few major sites use (are you listening, Warner Bros? :-). It's the following <FONT> tag:
<FONT FACE="Helvetica,Arial, sans-serif">
Notice that Helvetica is listed first. There's a reason: Savvy UNIX users can install a font manager that will allow the use of TrueType fonts.
