Best font to use?

The book - CSS Anthology, mentions that "At present, a popular design choice is to use a sans-serif font (such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, etc.) for the main body text of a site. However, most Web browsers default to a serif font like Times New Roman..."

My questions are:

(a) What's the best font to use and why?
(b) How would the selected font look on other operating systems like Mac or Linux?

Thanks.

 

The named font has to be on the person computer for it to be used, which is why more than one is named. It starts with the first choice and then goes on to the next if it isn't installed on the individual computer. Every computer has a default font which is shown if a font isn't specified or if none of the choices are installed. Google adsense uses arial and verdana. Those are probably the most common. No matter what font you specify, you can't be sure it is the one that will be displayed. Users can also have their own css that override your selections.

 

I think it is verdana.

 

Talk about resurrecting an old thread falguni1. Last post before you was in June 2005!

 

Anything simple and light looking is always good for me.

 

Hooray for thread bumping. Anyway you will find that a lot of sites now use a shade of gray as their text. I use verdana myself. Of course the default looks fine too.

~eric

 

lol how is this post so ancient yet on the first page ;0

 

what to do I searched for best font to use in dp search and this thread showed up and it was very useful. It helped me I changed my font to verdana and now my site looks clear and easy to read.

so I posted in this thread.