If you are trying to create a website with fonts that appear on a large percentage of computers, then you need to use a “web safe font”. While there are only a few fonts that are found on virtually every computer out there, if you use these fonts in your font stacks, your web pages will look correct.
Sans Serif Web Safe Fonts
Here are your best bets for sans serif fonts. If you include these in your font stacks, most people will see the page correctly.
- Arial
- Arial Black
- Tahoma
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
And some other choices that will give you good coverage, but might miss some computers, so include a more common one as a backup in your font stack.
- Century Gothic
- Geneva
- Lucida
- Lucida Sans
- Lucida Grande
Serif Web Safe Fonts
Here are some of your best bets for serif fonts.
- Courier
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Times
- Times New Roman
And here are some other choices that will give you some coverage, but you should include a more common one as a backup.
- MS Serif
- New York
- Palatino
- Palatino Linotype
Monospace Fonts
There are not as many monospace fonts that have wide acceptance across platforms. These are your best bets:
- Courier
- Courier New
And these fonts have some coverage.
- Lucida Console
- Monaco
Cursive and Fantasy Fonts
There is only one cursive font that is available on Windows and Macintosh, but not on Linux: Comic Sans MS. There are no fantasy fonts that have good coverage across browsers and operating systems.
Smart Phones and Mobile Devices
If you are designing pages for mobile devices, you have even fewer choices. I could find no common fonts for Android devices - instead you should use the @font-face tag to import the fonts you want to use. And for iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices, the common fonts include:
- Arial
- Courier
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Helvetica
- Palatino
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
