Avoid using Arial in body text because this font is very narrow and thus often results in poor readability and in an amateurish look. However, the fact that Arial is very narrow makes it an excellent choice for headings.
Some good, easily available fonts for the body text of printed manuals are:
▪Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Sans (initially developed for Linux; quite similar to Verdana) ▪Calibri (sans-serif; ships with Windows) ▪Corbel (sans-serif; ships with Windows) ▪Consolas (monospaced; a good alternative to Courier; ships with Windows) ▪Constantia (serif; designed to be used both on paper and on screen; ships with Windows) ▪Meta (must be licensed separately) ▪Univers (must be licensed separately) ▪Syntax (must be licensed separately) Common fonts for online help that are installed on most computers are:
▪Arial (ships with Windows) ▪Verdana (ships with Windows) ▪Segoe UI (ships with Windows) ▪Trebuchet MS (ships with Windows) ▪Courier New (monospaced; ships with Windows) In online help, generally use Verdana. Verdana has an excellent readability on screen and is installed on most computers. Use Arial only if you have little space—for example, in headings and in narrow table cells. Use Courier New for program source code.
In HTML, use the font-family attribute to specify some replacement fonts. If a particular font isn’t available on a user’s computer, the browser then uses the replacement font instead of the original font. (If you don’t specify a replacement font, the browser uses its default font, which may be very different from your original font.)
If your authoring tool doesn’t support adding the font-family attribute, consider running a global search and replace on the final HTML documents.
For Verdana, the font-family attribute may look like this:
font-family: 'Verdana', 'Bitstream Vera Sans', 'Trebuchet MS', 'Geneva', 'Arial', sans-serif;
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