Software Architect's Handbook

Optimizing web fonts

Good typography is an important part of designing a good user interface, readability, accessibility, and branding. There was a time when web designers were limited in the fonts they could use because there were only so many fonts that were guaranteed to be available on all systems. These were known as web safe fonts.

It is possible to use fonts other than just the web safe fonts. For instance, in CSS, you can use the font-family property to specify a list of fonts that can be used for an element, as follows:

p {  font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;}

With this approach, the browser will use the first one that it finds available on the system. A disadvantage of using this approach is that during testing you ...