Substituting Fonts .........................................................................................
A font is a particular design of the letters of the alphabet, digits, and associ-
ated symbols and punctuation marks. Two different fonts are displayed in
Figure 5-1, and it’s easy to see how many different ways you can distort the
characters of the alphabet and still leave them recognizable.
Many authors of books on CSS fret that people using various operating sys-
tems might not have specific fonts. So, for example, a designer might specify
the popular Times New Roman font, but a browser running on Linux might
substitute a similar font (perhaps Times Roman, or Garamond) rather than
the Times New Roman they specified.
But so what? First, font families share enough characteristics that it isn’t that
crucial. What’s more, the great majority of Web users use Windows, which
ships with a standard set of fonts, including Times New Roman. The viewer
is likely to get exactly what the designer specifies 96 percent of the time.
When memory and hard drive space was scarce in computers, people some-
times deleted fonts to conserve space. No longer. You can count on nearly all
users having the full Microsoft set that came with the operating system.
Nobody bothers to delete these fonts any more.
My computer has 295 fonts, and I’ve not added nor subtracted any since
Windows XP was installed. However, some of these aren’t actually separate
fonts — instead they’re variants such as Times New Roman Bold, Times New
Roman Bold Italic, and so on. On your computer, you’ll find fonts for every
occasion, and some fonts that are not good for any occasion except perhaps
scaring away users through sheer bad taste.
Figure 5-1:
Choose
fonts that
reflect the
image
you’re trying
to project.
The Joker
typeface
isn’t
reassuring
to bank
customers.
86 Part II: Looking Good with CSS
