font sets in golive

One of the biggest headaches web designers have is fonts. Just about every beginner makes the mistake of selecting a font which displays beautifully on their computer but which is not seen by others who don’t have the same font installed. And you may also have the problem of fonts displaying differently on different platforms and browsers.

Cascading Style Sheets (rather than by applying the font tag) give you more control over fonts. CSS allows you to set the text size more precisely but both CSS and font tags allow you to establish a set of related fonts for the browser to select from rather than just leaving it up to the browser. But which fonts do you use in the set?

While you can’t guarantee that every computer viewing your page will have the right fonts installed, there are certain fonts that have become pseudo-standard on the Web. Here is a list of fonts that your viewers are most likely to have:

Arial
Comic Sans MS
Courier [Mac]
Courier New [MS]
Georgia
Helvetica [Mac]
Times [Mac]
Times New Roman [MS]
Trebuchet
Verdana

Except for the very oldest computers, these are probably the fonts used on most computers out there, both Windows and Mac. Notice that some are Mac only and some are Microsoft only. By creating a font set for your site to use, you can be resonably sure that the font you specifiy will be sitting happily in the System Folder/Directory of your user.

But before you can use font sets in your style sheets or font tags you must create them. Here's how.