Core Fonts For The Web - Overview

Overview

The fonts were licensed to Microsoft by Monotype Corporation or designed for Microsoft by Microsoft's own font designers or external designers. The fonts were designed to:

• Be highly legible on screen;
• Offer a wide range of typographic “timbres” within a small number of typefaces; and
• Support extensive internationalisation.

These design goals and the fonts' broad availability have made some of them extremely popular with web designers. However, these proprietary fonts (or some of them) are not distributed with some modern operating systems by default (e.g. in Android, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris or some Symbian versions) and they are substituted by other fonts (e.g. by free software fonts, such as Liberation fonts, Ghostscript fonts, Droid fonts, DejaVu fonts and others). All of these fonts in their latest versions are installed by default in latest versions of Mac OS X (e.g. Mac OS X 10.4 and newer), but older versions of Mac OS X did not install some of them by default (e.g. Andale Mono, Impact) and old versions of Mac OS also did not include many of them (e.g. Arial). Some of these fonts are also not installed by default in iOS (e.g. Andale Mono, Comic Sans MS, Impact, Webdings).

While the project has formally ended, the benefits of using broadly available fonts remain: to increase the likelihood that content will be displayed in chosen font or in a metric-compatible alternative. In addition to the Core fonts for the Web, some newer fonts, such as those packaged with Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org or other software could form a new canon of core fonts. Broader web browser adoption of the web fonts specification may ultimately render the notion of core fonts obsolete by allowing the real-time downloading and display of specific fonts.