Re: (OT) fonts (was Station Platform Name Boards [NSW])

[Michael Kurkowski <mk@netstra.com.au>]

Jonathan Boles <mousewithglasses@mail.com> said:

>If anyone bothered to read my original message, I included an entire
>font substitution list!!
>I had "Tahoma,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial". Do really think that someone
>will have none of these fonts on their computer?? Even then, if they
>don't have the font the text will appear in Times New Roman anyway!
>
>Rob Kearey <robk@powerup.com.au> wrote in article
><392212BE.115A2898@powerup.com.au>...
>
>> Read it again, Ben!
>> 
>> Consider the possibilites of not having the target font on the client
>> machine.
>> 
>> Rob K

I think you are both on a totally different track here (aus.rail, pardon 
the pun...). Understandably, what Rob is saying, is that an English font 
may not appear on an Arabic computer, for example. What Ben and Jonathan 
are saying is, that if the computer doens't have that font, it won't have a 
detrimental effect to the webpage as such. 

My opinion on the matter is, that if a website is designed to be read in 
English only, then there is no need whatsoever for any foreign language 
support, including omission of the <font> tag. Assuming that the target 
audience is 99% you don't want to inconvenience them from an 
aesthetically pleasing website by omitting the <font> tag, to make the page 
look the same for someone who is using another language.

On an operating system like Mac OS or Linux, there may not be Tahoma or 
Arial, so my website has the following font preference: Tahoma, Verdana, 
Arial, Helvetica. My page views fine, and fairly close to Windows under Mac 
OS and Linux. If you support English versions of Windows, Mac OS and Linux, 
consider that you have supported practically 99.5% of your website's 
viewers. I even have a screendump of my website under Linux floating around 
somewhere, so I'll have to dig it up and put it up on a web server for 
inspection. In my case, it falls back to Helvetica.

Regards

Michael

(The statistics I used are roughly based on that of my webpage stats).