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  • Web Safe Fonts

    Here is a quick explanation about fonts on the internet:

    Why is there web safe fonts?
    Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari can only use the fonts installed on each computer. This means that every visitor to your website needs to have all the fonts you want to use installed on their computer. Different people will have different fonts on their computer, so there needs to be a standard set of fonts.

    The most common web safe fonts available are: Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier, Courier New, Helvetica, Impact, Times, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana.

    But I want a font that's not in the web safe font list?
    Your website designer can do this as CSS does allow you to assign a custom font. This font will need to be uploaded to the server where your website is being hosted. In saying this some custom fonts on your website won't work with some browsers (Internet Explorer being the biggest culprit). This is why there needs to be default web safe fonts to fall back to. CSS allows for the font-family style, so if one font is not available it uses the next indicated font.

    For example: "font-family: Univers, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" Univers is the first font listed so this one will be used first. If Univers is not available the website will default to Verdana, and so on.

    If you want to see what your content will look like defaulted to a specific font: Copy the text from your website and paste it into a text document. Select the content, then change the fonts between the chosen font and the default font. You can contact your web designer to discuss what custom fonts you want to use and what default fonts to assign.


    Brynn Neilson About
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