The font that is selected is not a single font face, but a “family”, and thus may be dependent on other typographic property values to select the correct face within the family. However, in general, you can adjust those default fonts in the settings.The font-family property defines the font that is applied to the selected element. Firefox on Windows is for example using the fonts Times New Roman (serif), Arial (sans-serif) and Courier New (monospace). They include Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Verdana, Lucida Sans, Tahoma, and Century Gothic. The word Sans is French for without, and Serif refers to the extra tails. Sans Serif fonts are those without the tail.

Which font is actually be taken if such a property is defined, is decided by the browser. Popular Serifs are Times New Roman, Century, Bookman, Lucida, Garamond, and more. monospace is standing for a font with fixed width (for example like Courier), cursive is standing for a handwriting font and fantasy is standing for any extraordinary font. Which, to some people, might make it a bit boring.

Next to serif and sans-serif, there are other values you can use at this position. My question is if you use just this css: font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif is enough to ensure that the font is available on most computers Yes. What is serif in design A serif is a graphic design component of text characters that dates back to early Roman times. Sans-serif fonts include Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, and Gill Sans. The specified alternatives will be gone through in the defined order and if none of the listed fonts are installed, sans-serif is ensuring that at least a font without serifs will be used for the text. What font family is sans-serif A sans-serif font will typically be the default font in digital word processing programs. The situation is similar with the h2 headings from the example. The point is that you can at least control a bit how the font face of the website is looking like in cases when the preferred fonts are not available. With this, the browser gets the instruction to use at least some font with serifs, if the other serif fonts are not available. If both fonts, Georgia and Times are not available, we are coming to the value 'serif'. If the font Georgia is not installed or available, Times should be used instead. If a browser gets these instructions, it should write the h1 headings preferentially in the font Georgia.

'serif' is standing for a typeface with serifs such as Georgia, Times or Times New Roman while 'sans-serif' is meaning a font without serifs like Arial, Helvetica or Verdana.īut what does that mean in concrete terms? Let's have a look at two definitions of font families: h1 Both 'serif' as well as 'sans-serif' are not a direct font but a generic font family defined in the browser.

Is verdana font family sans serif