Default fonts?

What fonts will most site visitors have?

[Robert Charlton]

In the old days it used to be Times, Helvetica, and Courier, or those families... really depressing.

I'm drawing up specs for some new sites to be built with text headings instead of graphics, and I wondering what fonts most site visitors are likely to have. "Most" probably indicates Windows 95 et seq, but I'd like to include Macs too.

In the default font sets of all operating systems in popular use, what are the font families I can count on everybody having? Or is it still just Times, Helvetica, and Courier? :(

[Robert Charlton]

PS - I notice that on the third thread Woz links to in his post above, Tedster asked the same question about the degree of penetration for the Microsoft fontpack... and he didn't find a solution either.

[typophile]

>But unicode won't solve that problem, as far as I understand it.

Yes, of course. I wasn't suggesting some kind of magical solution where you could make a single site for all languages.
Each site would still have to be translated (preferably by a human being) into sub-sites for each desired language and script. The embedded open type simply means that the site would never open with question marks or boxes replacing type but with the actual glyphs neccessary regardless of what computer you are using. So, for instance, if I am a Russian on a business trip to Greece and I enter a cyber cafe and browse a site built in this way, I would simply select the Russian sub-site from the home page and that site would appear in the Cyrillic script.

[mivox]

embedded open type simply means that the site would never open with question marks or boxes replacing type

Ahh... I see. Although I *was* secretly hoping that some fabulous new technology was on the horizon, and you were just confusing the terminology when you used the term "unicode".. :)

As for the Microsoft core fonts, I'd imagine they *are* pretty universal on new machines today... at least where Windows/Macs are concerned. Both of those platforms come with IE pre-installed. As far as *older* mac systems... it's not as universal, but even then, IE is the dominant browser.

I think the Microsoft core fonts would probably be a pretty safe default set, las long as you specified Mac-standard equivalents as the second or third choice in the specific font set. I don't have any statistics to back that up, but (from what I know about statistics...) my gut feeling is likely to be about as accurate! ;)

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