Posts Tagged ‘font’

Web safe fonts

Despite growing @font-face support, it’s still useful to know which fonts are web safe.

This very cool chart was made by Dustin Brewer,

web safe fonts

Tahoma is missing from the table. I think it’s up in the air whether or not it’s web safe. It’s shipped with all versions of Windows since Windows 95 and ships with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and higher, but on Linux you generally won’t find it – it’s not installed by default and not part of the msttcorefonts package. However, a fallback to the similiar, but wider, Verdana may be acceptable.

@font-face

I’ve always played it safe with fonts when it comes to web design, sticking to fonts commonly available across operating systems such as Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, etc. However, I’m pretty psyched to see how well the CSS @font-face attribute is supported. Format support is somewhat of a mess: EOT for Internet Explorer and TTF/OTF for WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari). However, Firefox 3.6+ supports the new Web Open Font Format, which is poised to become the new standard and will, hopefully, quickly find it’s way into the other browsers.

If your in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, here’s a font I’ve loved for a while, Titillium:

TitilliumText999wt

I’ve never really had problems finding fonts for free or even commercial use, but Font Squirrel now makes the whole search process dead simple and super easy. They also seem to have a pretty awesome converter; though I used this oft2woff converter for my little demo above.