Delphinidin

The available font families that can be specified vary depending on the operating system. Using a default installation, Windows does not provide the same fonts as Mac OS X, for instance. Furthermore, the available fonts also vary depending on the programs installed on the user’s computer. For instance, Microsoft Office installs a number of extra fonts in addition to those that ship with Mac OS X or Windows. In fact, with the exception of a few fonts, Mac OS X with Microsoft Offi ce installed provides pretty much the same fonts as installed on Windows. Without Microsoft Office installed, however, many Windows fonts are not available on the Mac platform.

There is a huge number of fonts available across platforms, too many to list here. A great resource which lists many fonts and the likelihood of their being installed on each platform can be found at www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/index.shtml.

For this reason, there is the possibility of font inconsistencies, that the font-family property can accept more than one font as its value. The browser will use the first font provided that is installed and available on the end user’s computer. The browser will fall back to the next font in the list in the event that previous fonts are not available. Subsequent fonts in the list are called fallback fonts. This capability is provided because it is difficult to foresee which fonts will be available on the user’s computer.

The effect of specifying more than one font is that the browser goes through the list of commaseparated
fonts until it finds one that it is capable of displaying. CSS provides a couple of generic fonts that you can always rely on being installed and for this reason it is good practice to include a generic font as the last in the list. The following table outlines the generic font family names defined in CSS.

GENERIC  >     FONT RESEMBLES
serif            >    Times, Times New Roman
sans-serif    >    Helvetica, Arial
cursive        >    Zapf-Chancery
fantasy        >    Western
monospace >    Courier, Courier New

You will find that most text on the Web is displayed with a sans-serif font family. This is because sans-serif fonts tend to be easier to read on screen. Printed materials such as book often use serif fonts because most people find them easier to read off screen. Serif fonts can also be used on the Web but usually only with text which is larger than average such as headings.