home

Using System Fonts

The CSS used for this page is listed at the bottom.

currently, verdana is commented out in the custom css for this page.

testing system fonts. except i start the list with verdana, my current preferred common or safe font. 99% of Mac and Windows systems contain verdana. 70% of unix/linux machines have verdana installed. 'Ubuntu' would be the system font for my desktop Linux system, which is based upon Ubuntu, but I don't like the font. i comment out verdana for testing on other devices.

mar 2, 2017 update: i don't remember where i found the above info. maybe i culled the stats from links below. verdana is not considered a safe font because unix systems do not contain it by default. my desktop linux system (mint, ubuntu) did not contain verdana. i had to install a font package that contained verdana. maybe verdana is not a safe font because 30% of nix systems are without verdana. web.mit.edu - Safe web fonts

another mar 2, 2017 update: found the verdana stats here

When viewing this page on my Chromebook, the system font used is Roboto. That's according Chrome's Inspector: ctrl + shift + i and then select Computed tab and then view the bottom right window pane, which is called Rendered Font's and it showed Roboto -- Local file (358 glyphs)

When I comment out Roboto from the custom, inline CSS used for this page, and while still viewing on my Chromebook, the inspector said that the font used was Arimo, which is not listed in my CSS. Arimo looks similar Arial Grotesque.

Arimo is a Google font

Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.

In my CSS list, Helvetica is listed near the bottom. When Helvetica is chosen, the Chromebook uses Arimo.

From the story about an old font coming back, I wish this existed now:

Eventually, in the future, if other browsers implement the feature, a simple font-family: system will take care of everything ...

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

CSS used for this page

body {
    font-size: 21px;
    color: #222;
    font-family: 
    /* Verdana, */
    -apple-system, 
    BlinkMacSystemFont, 
    "San Francisco", 
    "Roboto",
    "Oxygen",
    "Segoe UI", 
    "Ubuntu", 
    "Cantarell",
    "Fira Sans", 
    "Droid Sans", 
    "Helvetica Neue", 
    "Lucida Grande",
    "Helvetica", 
    sans-serif;
}

April 2017

I liked the font setup for this site: https://mmccaff.github.io. After viewing the CSS, I saw that the author used system fonts.

html{font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI","Roboto","Oxygen","Ubuntu","Cantarell","Fira Sans","Droid Sans","Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5}
home - info - search