| > Using standard fonts is how you achieve consistency. If my web page downloads a font to a browser for that browser to use, every browser capable of downloading that font will use that font. If my web page specifies a list of fonts that users may or may not have on their system, every browser may display a different font from that list (or even a font not from that list). I suppose YMMV and all that, but I would say the first case is clearly giving a more consistent result than the second case. That doesn't make the second case "bad," per se, but on my system Hacker News is in Verdana and on different distributions of Linux it's in... shrug emoji? There's a Microsoft Core Fonts package floating around out there, but not everybody has it installed. And lately it's become fashionable to specify a font stack of "default system fonts," so Macs get San Francisco, Windows 7+ users get Segoe UI, etc. That's fine, and maybe it's exactly what you want... but don't call it "consistent." I almost guarantee you have fonts on your system installed that you will not want me to use on a web page, and I can also almost guarantee you that there are a lot of pages out there that have "custom fonts" that are just fine. They're just fine! Nobody reads a web page set in Charter or Franklin Gothic or any other rational typeface for body text and screams in outrage at its illegibility. Maybe there are designers out there who want to force terrible horrible no-good custom fonts down your throat because they want to make your reading experience worse. Maybe there are web pages set in Zapfino and Wingdings. I don't know. But when you say "custom fonts," I say "professional high-quality typeface that is consistent across all browsers." That's it. That's all I'm trying to give you. |