I-D Media London Blog » fonts http://blog.i-dmedialondon.co.uk Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:12:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Helvetica/Arial Based Font Stacks Across Platforms http://blog.i-dmedialondon.co.uk/2009/07/helveticaarial-based-font-stacks-across-platforms/ http://blog.i-dmedialondon.co.uk/2009/07/helveticaarial-based-font-stacks-across-platforms/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:28:16 +0000 Nic http://blog.i-dmedialondon.co.uk/?p=80 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.

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