Fonts like Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Georgia, Impact, Lucida and Lucida Grande, Times and Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Geneva, and many others are owned by Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Thanks to licensing deals, your computer may have shipped with fonts that you aren't legally allowed to copy and redistribute. Very few of us have consciously paid for a font, and yet most people have high-priced fonts on their computers. This can be confusing if you're not used to thinking or caring about obscure software licenses, especially since it seems like all fonts are free. The first thing you need is an openly licensed font. As a side benefit, your site may load faster, as you'll be making one fewer external call upon loading each page. If you don't see a need to assist Google in building a record of everyone's activity on the web, the good news is you can host your own webfonts, and it's as simple as uploading fonts to your host and using one easy CSS rule. It's $0 to use, but major sites like Google love to keep track of who references their data, fonts included. The problem with this free convenience, of course, is that it doesn't come without cost. Google and other providers even host openly licensed fonts, which designers can include on their sites with a simple CSS rule. Fonts on websites were rendered for the client by the server, rather than requiring the web browser to find a font on the user's system. Then webfonts happened, moving font management from the client to the server. It's better than using a graphic instead of text, but it's still an awkward, inelegant method of font non-management, However, in the early-ish days of the web, it's all we had to work with. This is a designer's attempt to define a specific font, provide a fallback if a user doesn't have Times New Roman installed, and offer yet another fallback if the user doesn't have Times either. If you have even a basic understanding of CSS, you've probably seen this kind of declaration: h1 And yet it's still a problem because we're human and we're forgetful. For example, have you designed a cool flyer and, when you take the file somewhere for printing, find all the titles rendered in Arial because the printer doesn't have the fancy font you used in your design? There are ways to prevent this, of course: you can convert words in special fonts into paths, bundle fonts into a PDF, bundle open source fonts with your design files, or-at least-list the fonts required. Fonts are often a mystery to many computer users.
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