Commonly available fonts
Transferring fonts across computers
Now comes the hard part: how do you ensure that the fonts (among other things) that you so meticolously chose for your presentation or website, display correctly when you transfer the file to another computer, or put your website on the web? Well, there really is no easy way to do so, especially on the web. Listed below are some workarounds that you can use though.
The easiest way is to ensure that you use a set of common fonts that are available across the PCs that you’ll be using. For instance, Arial, Arial Black, Times New Roman and Verdana are available on virtually all Windows computers. Helvetica (Arial’s big brother) and Times (the equivalent of Times New Roman) are staples on the Mac platform, and on some UNIX computers.
SANS SERIF
- Arial, Arial Narrow, Arial Black
- Tahoma
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
SERIF
- Georgia
- Palatino
- Times New Roman
- Book Antiqua
MODERN
- Poster Bodoni
FIXED WIDTH
- Courier New
On Macs, the most common fonts are:
- Times
- New York
- Palatino
- Geneva
Since the vast majority of users will be stuck, I mean, working on Windows PCs, these fonts should be more than enough for the web, print and presentations. Of course, if you have no plans to work across multiple computers, you can use whatever fonts are available on your computer. Even better, if you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat reader), you can always save the file as a PDF, and ensure that all the fonts are available. Of course this is only useful for documents that will be printed, or downloaded from the web.
Note: Now really, who has time to keep track of all the different platforms and all the different fonts that are available on those platforms. Well someone at Microsoft obviously did: you can find out what fonts are available on different versions of Windows, as well as those that ship with Microsoft applications like Access and Word, on the Microsoft typography website.
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