In recent times, Lucida variants have become popular, due to Apple using it not only as the
default font in Mac OS X, but also on its website. Despite Lucida Grande not being available
for Windows, Lucida Sans Unicode is common and similar enough to be used as a first
fallback. Usefully, Lucida is common on UNIX systems, meaning that sites using Lucida variants
can look fairly similar text-wise across all three major operating systems. Another
pairing??”albeit one that??™s less common??”is Tahoma and Geneva, so use those with care,
providing more generic fallbacks.
Despite its lack of penetration on Windows, Helvetica is often used as a fallback sansserif
font, due to its prevalence on Linux.
pre is the element for preformatted text, used to display monospace text in an identical
fashion to how it??™s formatted in the original HTML document. It??™s commonly used
for online FAQs, film scripts, and the like.
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See the following images for a comparison of several sans-serif fonts on Mac (left) and
Windows (right).
Serif fonts for the Web
Although popular in print, serif fonts fare less well online. If using serifs, ensure you render
them large enough so that they don??™t break down into an illegible mess. Georgia is
perhaps the best available web-safe serif, especially when used at sizes equivalent to
12 pixels and above, and it can be more suitable than a sans-serif if you??™re working with
traditional subject matter, or if you??™re attempting to emulate print articles (such as in the
following screenshot of the online column Revert to Saved; www.
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