Good Font for Website

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prodigee

Gawd
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
987
Hey,

Well I have made a website on my Mac not thinking about the fonts and I used Helvetica, but of course not all PC's have the font, so what is a font similar to Helvetica that I can use that looks good on both PC and Mac?

Thanks,

prodigee
 
don't forget that playing with the css line-height property can do wonders for making your text look better :)

btw, you can specify multiple fonts via css, and the first one that the computer has installed will be installed. So if you like Helvetica, but want to be able to fall back on Arial, you could do this. Should look good on Mac, PC and Linux...
Code: 
body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans; }
 
Well I did the website in iWeb so there was no programming involved in there for me. Learning CSS is something I really want to do, but I just have not found the time for yet, but I will definitely look into Arial as the font of choice.
 
I reccomend not specifying a specific font and leaving it with the target machine's default.
 
Well the problem is I want it to display well on both Mac's and Windows based machines and the way it is not it looks a whole lot better on the Mac than it does on my Windows desktop.
 
prodigee said:
Well the problem is I want it to display well on both Mac's and Windows based machines and the way it is not it looks a whole lot better on the Mac than it does on my Windows desktop.
Click to expand...

This should be the next "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercial :D.
 
We ended up using Calibri which came in Vista and is in OS X, so now all is well. Thank you guys.
 
william_fontaine said:
Pssh, no one uses that anymore, it's years old!
Click to expand...
On the slim chance that this isn't sarcasm, I'll say that you're half right.... There's still plenty of medium and large organizations still on XP. But I'd draw the line there, instead of optimizing for even older stuff like IE5.x, Mac OS 9, etc.


Easiest workaround would be to put Verdana or Arial as a fall-to font name in your CSS if Calibri is not found on the client.
 
Unfortunately, the sad reality is that there's still a sizable percentage of people that use IE6. In some foreign markets (S.America and Asia) it's still the majority.
 
Zinn said:
don't forget that playing with the css line-height property can do wonders for making your text look better :)

btw, you can specify multiple fonts via css, and the first one that the computer has installed will be installed. So if you like Helvetica, but want to be able to fall back on Arial, you could do this. Should look good on Mac, PC and Linux...
Code: 
body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans; }
Click to expand...


Yeah I always practice this method with my CSS, it helps insure that a user will have at least one of these fonts.
 
Calibri is a great looking font that is very easy to read. Excellent choice.
 
Arainach said:
I reccomend not specifying a specific font and leaving it with the target machine's default.
Click to expand...
This will generally be Times New Roman. Not advisable unless you have a serif fetish :)

prodigee said:
Well the problem is I want it to display well on both Mac's and Windows based machines and the way it is not it looks a whole lot better on the Mac than it does on my Windows desktop.
Click to expand...
OS X's font smoothing is very different from Windows'. Windows favors readability whereas OS X favors accuracy. Neither is correct, but type in OS X "looks better" while type in Windows "reads better".
 
Yeah I noticed that. I wish that helvetican was on Windows machines by default because that is the definetly the best font regardless...
 
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