Web Designers Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts for Windows, Mac and Linux
Web designers often feel that they are restricted to a basic set of core web fonts. This small set of fonts has been widely distributed most designers stick to them, just to be on the safe side. However, when you look at the fonts available on the three most widely used operating systems, you can see that this really isn’t necessary.
All three operating systems come with a variety of fonts, many of which can be reasonably substituted for each other without affecting the design.You can also choose fonts that have the same look and feel that you want, but may not be close matches. This allows for much more flexibility in design while still ensuring compatibility across operating systems…
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nathan
Yeah, word on the street is that Android (Google’s mobile OS) will/does run on webkit, too.
Ms. Wakame
Oh yes, I have such high hopes Webkit will be adopted by everyone one day! For starters it’ll be so handy if all mobile phones have webkit browsers like the iPhone really soon.
nathan
I’ve been using this guy.
The problem with substituting fonts that look similar but aren’t actually of the same family is that they can be of widely varied sizes.
For example, on that site look at the difference between Bookman Old Style and Hoefler (the second row in the first table.) You’d need to use some sort of browser detection to then set the size of a font, because one font’s 12px size can still be larger/smaller than another font of the same size…
Right now Webkit (the engine that runs Safari’s CSS rendering, among a bunch of other, smaller programs) has already implemented Web fonts, which is a CSS3 thing. Give it a search.
I hope that someday all browsers adopts Webkit, or at least everyone gets on to the same rendering engine…which would make our lives easier 10fold and websites cheaper all around.