So I had been thinking that Palatino Linotype was a common enough font to be used on Windows and Macs, but it turns out it's not really as common as I thought. A lot of Macs will default it to Georgia, and as a certain boss-like person was heard to say recently, "I hate Georgia Bold!"
This led me to dig in and do a bit more research about common web fonts. I found this pretty handy chart of common fonts that also includes Unix fonts, for what it's worth. That page led me to a site which contains surveys of most common serif and sans serif fonts installed on Macs and Windows machines. (alternately broken down here by all Mac or all Windows fonts.) While the sample size is kinda small, it was still interesting to see... For instance Palatino on Macs came it at just under 80%. So what would people say is the right threshold to consider a font common enough for general use? 90%?
...and just when will we design a site using only Comic Sans and Impact?
This led me to dig in and do a bit more research about common web fonts. I found this pretty handy chart of common fonts that also includes Unix fonts, for what it's worth. That page led me to a site which contains surveys of most common serif and sans serif fonts installed on Macs and Windows machines. (alternately broken down here by all Mac or all Windows fonts.) While the sample size is kinda small, it was still interesting to see... For instance Palatino on Macs came it at just under 80%. So what would people say is the right threshold to consider a font common enough for general use? 90%?
...and just when will we design a site using only Comic Sans and Impact?
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Here's a link that Steve Perks sent over to me this morning talking about font stacks: http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-stacks/. It also points out a lot of the nuances when using certain fonts for headers and for body text. A VERY insightful read.
Too lazy to copy+paste the link in the post above?
Thanks for the link! So would it be much more work for the production team to implement font stacks? Is this something we could/should start trying out?
Nah, not at all. Steve proposed the idea to me so I don't think they mind the extra font stack.
coincidentally... the latest article on web fonts from Smashing Magazine > http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/27/css-typographic-tools-and-techniques/
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