Font list

[donboe]

I'm working on a new design, and the owner would like to use Calibri font. What would be the best font-list to use? I remember ralph m writing something about font lists/stacking but can't find it back?

[ralph.m]

Heh, I don't know much about this stuff. Maybe you are thinking of Michael Tuck (Black Max) as he's written a fair bit on this, such as here:

8 Definitive Web Font Stacks

FWIW, I have recently been playing with Calibri, and found some of these fonts to work quite well with it (on Mac and Windoze):

calibri, "gill sans", "gill sans mt", "liberation sans", "dejavu sans condensed", candara, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;

[donboe]

calibri, "gill sans", "gill sans mt", "liberation sans", "dejavu sans condensed", candara, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;

Hi ralph, thanks for the answer! I presume this last line is the desired font-family ?

[noonnope]

Code Style: Font stack builder:

[Stevie D]

FWIW, I have recently been playing with Calibri, and found some of these fonts to work quite well with it (on Mac and Windoze):

calibri, "gill sans", "gill sans mt", "liberation sans", "dejavu sans condensed", candara, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;

Ugh, yuck.

I would never use Gill Sans or any of its variants for online body text. It's optimised for print rather than online use, so it doesn't line up well with the pixel grid, and so often comes out looking pretty scrappy. Yes, it's nice in print, and it's nice when it's living it large as a big heading, but at body text size, no thanks

And I can see no reason to specify Candara further down the font stack. It's more or less 99.9999% guaranteed that anyone who has Candara will also have Calibri, so there are probably only about 3 people on the planet who would ever see your site in Candara.

[Stevie D]

Code Style: Font stack builder:

Is it just me, or is that a completely worthless website? As far as I can tell, all it does is give a point-and-dribble interface where you click on all the fonts you want and tell it what order you want them in, and it produces the CSS code that you could have typed in a quarter of the time yourself. What I was hoping for was some kind of suggestion of similar and more popular fonts to go lower down the stack, but unless I've missed it, there's nothing at all like that there.

[noonnope]

Code Style: Build better CSS font stacks

Most common font stacks


You can build new ones, improve the most common, and you get the probability a new added font has to be present on a platform or another.

[donboe]

Is it just me, or is that a completely worthless website? As far as I can tell, all it does is give a point-and-dribble interface where you click on all the fonts you want and tell it what order you want them in, and it produces the CSS code that you could have typed in a quarter of the time yourself. What I was hoping for was some kind of suggestion of similar and more popular fonts to go lower down the stack, but unless I've missed it, there's nothing at all like that there.

It was not just you I was a bit confused myself when I arrived on the site. The second second link from noonnope is way more informative. Thanks for that

[noonnope]

For Calibri: Better CSS Font Stacks | Unit Verse

“Gill Sans”, Calibri, “Trebuchet MS”, sans-serif - p
“Gill Sans”, “Trebuchet MS”, Calibri, sans-serif - t

This may also help you decide: Web-safe Fonts | Web Typography | Speaking In Styles.