Fonts and Web Fonts
Albert W. Starkweather, Philatelic Communicator
The general font rules that govern print publications also apply to visual presentations. While text fonts should be chosen for a high degree of readability, poster-style title fonts can be particularly attractive, as well as inline and contour variations. Many of these work particularly well when they are set in bold primary colors.
Type size is very important in planning pages for Internet / intranet display. What may appear to be normal sized on a large, high-resolution monitor, may shout on a small monitor at low resolution.
Web designers essentially are at the mercy of the viewers and the fonts they have installed on their computers.
The safest choices are serif and sans serif. Nearly all Windows-based computers have Arial and Times New Roman and Macintosh computers have Times and Helvetica. Both have the ubiquitous and generally despised Courier. Text set in sans serif is generally easier to read at screen resolution.
To force the browser on the viewer’s end to display serif or sans serif, the following Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding may be used:
or .
The browser will attempt to load the first choice. If it is missing, it will attempt to load the second choice. If this too fails, it will load a generic serif or sans serif. Color may be assigned to HTML text.
New Web technology can force a viewer’s browser to display specific fonts. However, the safest bet is to specify serif or sans serif fonts to ensure the highest level of compatibility.
Some good fonts for presentation.
A specific font for a splash screen or heading may be generated by creating a Graphic Image Format (GIF) or Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG or JPG) image in a drawing or imaging program.
It must be remembered that GIF and JPEG images do not contain searchable text that can be found by site visitors or Web crawlers that index sites.
Designers who desire to have their pages appear as they have created them have turned to the portable document format (PDF) which maintains consistency across different platforms. Its largest drawback is that it puts another interface on the browser screen.
Another problem is getting special characters to display properly. Special encodings are necessary to create extended characters. However, if there is any uncertainty about this, the type should be generated as a GIF or JPEG graphic. In general, it would be wise to use the words associated with certain symbols, such as copyright and registered trademark. 
