Helvetica/Arial Based Font Stacks Across Platforms
Recently when working on a project when I notice my the text looks really poor on some Linux distros.
A few years ago I wouldn’t have necessarily cared but because of the growth of Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse as well as the fact that Linux is now pre-installed on many netbooks, I have decided it is something I will care about.
The reason for the font issues is because Linux does not necessarily have Arial or Helvetica pre-installed hence the users see system text instead. So I did a bit of research on Linux pre-installed equivalents and found FreeSans or San-Serif to be the most common equivalents installed. I now use “font-family:Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,FreeSans,sans-serif;” as my font stack. This seems to give the best results on every platform.