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Stylistically, there are two basic font families: Serif and sans serif. I expect
some typographers would berate me for so crudely narrowing the categories down
in such a simplistic fashion, but there it is.
A serif font is one in which each of the letters contain mild artistic flourishes that appear to give the glyphs ledges and feet. Common serif fonts are Times, Bookman, Palatino, and Century. A sans serif font is one that does not have these extra flourishes. Common sans serif fonts are Helvetica, Arial, Geneva, Gothic, and Swiss. It is a commonly held belief that readers prefer a serif font for reading long passages of text. The opinions on the reasons for this vary, but I side with the folks who feel that the serifs add visual information that allows the reader to distinguish between letters faster and more accurately than with sans serif fonts. When graphic artists begin the design of their documents, they are very careful about choosing the proper font to convey the nuance of the message that it contains. Using HTML 2.0, it is not possible for the author of a Web page to exercise any control over the font being used to display their content. Graphic artists also know that it is useful to change font faces as a mechanism to indicate different voices in their document. A common example of this is to use a different font for the title of a paragraph or section than for the body text. Newspapers will often set the title of a story using a sans serif font, and the body text using a serif font. Again, HTML 2.0 provides no mechanism for allowing the Web author to control their content at this level. With Microsoft Internet Explorer, some additions have been made to HTML that allow the page author to suggest fonts to use in laying out the Web page. Using the new FACE attribute of the FONT tag, it is possible to create content that should at least be able to properly display serif and sans serif fonts on any platform. The format of changing the font selection within HTML looks something like this:
For this attribute, facename above is replaced with the actual font name to be used. While
most examples illustrate listing a single font name, it is recommended that you
try to overload this value with a comma-separated list of fonts to use in order to make your document
readable on a wide variety of systems and platforms. The first
font in the list that is found will be used. An example of selecting a sans serif
font might look like this:
If you have access to a number of different platforms, you should check to see what
fonts are commonly installed onto it, and make your font specification accordingly.
This process will be made much easier with the addition of Cascading Style Sheets
with the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0, and other browsers that support this
standard document description format.
You may also be interested in an effort that Microsoft is undertaking to
make a core set of standard fonts freely available for the Internet. This would
provide high-quality fonts that would all use the same font name, and be usable
on systems that support TrueType fonts. You can take a look at our
Web Font To see examples of various fonts, select one of the specimen pages available from the list on the left.
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