Quite a while ago, a friend asked me if I could point them to a list of web-safe cursive fonts. Which should've been an easy ask, right? Couple o' minutes with Google, mail 'em a link or two, to pages displaying handy lists of same; job done. Erm, nope!
But before we go any further, let's just define, for the uninitiated, what the hell my friend's horribly geeky-looking question meant.
A cursive font is, quite simply, a font which looks like handwriting. And at this point, the only one I can name, and be just-about one hundred percent certain that you will be able to take a look at as an example is the dreaded Comic Sans MS. Well, I say "one hundred percent." If you're reading this on Windows there is, according to this list [link broken: see, instead, the table at the end of this post], a 99.6% chance that you've just read the name of The Font Which Should Ne'er Be Seen in the relevant type-face. On a Mac, it's a 95.7% chance, and on Linux, 68.4%. (That's before the installation of any office software or other such programs which almost certainly install it, along with many other fonts additional to those shipped with the OS.) Which brings us neatly to what I mean by "web-safe."
In order for you to read a web-page in the font which the author has specified in the style sheet (a document, usually separate from the web-page, which specifies the various styles the author wishes to apply to the page), that font has to be installed on your computer. But. Computers with differing operating systems will, typically, have different sets of fonts installed as standard. See, for example, the comparisons of OS's cursive fonts at the page linked in the previous paragraph.
To get around this, any page-designer worth her salt will specify several fonts, in decreasing order of preference, in her style sheet. If the browser can't find the first one in the list, installed on the machine it's running on, it'll move on to try the next, and so on. Typically, these lists are three terms long; the first two being aimed at Windows and Mac, and a third which will be a generic family name, specifying the general "kind" of font wanted—serif, cursive, sans-serif, monospace etc. Thus, because of the style I specify in my HTML (yes, HTML: I have to use in-line styles), Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif, Windows users should be reading this in Book Antiqua but Mac users, who probably don't have that font installed, should be reading it in the virtually identical Palatino, and Linux users, along with the occasional Windows or Mac user who may have, for some strange reason, uninstalled my preferred fonts, should be reading it in their browser's default serif font. (For the most part, Linux users get a bit of a raw deal here, with most font-stacks, or font-families, as they're usually called, being aimed at the two most common OS; Windows and Mac.)
And now, Gentle Reader, let us meander slightly, and discuss the Comic Sans typeface. Because I think it's been somewhat unfairly maligned. If used with discretion, on the right sort of subject—advertising a children's party, say—it's a very effective font. It has the look of being handwritten, in a slightly child-like hand, but is still very clear and legible. (And with the caveat that it should be used appropriately, I must say I think it's quite a well-designed font, from that perspective.) It lends itself to cheery, carefree messages quite handily. The problem is, it tends to get misused. Dreadfully. But I don't think that that misuse is (completely) the fault of the users.
Imagine that you're writing a web-page. Imagine further that you want to make a section of that page look handwritten, for whatever reason. Maybe you want to portray a written note or letter in a work of fiction or… Oh, make up yer own scenario. So off you bumble, looking for a list of web-safe fonts (See! Twas a meander, not a digression!), and you quickly find that you don't really have much of a choice. Eight sans-serif, two monospace, four serif, three symbols-fonts, of which one looks vaguely useful, but the other two are variants of Wingdings ffs (I mean to say, how bloody useful is Wingdings ever going to be, that we need two sets of the damn things?), and only one cursive—that is to say, "looks a bit like handwriting"—font. Yep, you guessed it. Comic frellin' Sans.
Now, given that choice, anyone who's knocked about the geekier parts of the web will immediately drop the handwriting idea like a hot, acid-covered dog-turd sandwich. Anyone who hasn't, though, will probably decide that, while it's not exactly the flowing, Spencerian script they were hoping to find, it does at least give more of a feel of a handwritten note than the Times New Roman, or whatever, that the main body of their text is formatted in, and plump for it as the best, indeed only, choice available to give something like the impression they were after. And so, in the middle of a (hopefully) well-written drama set during the Napoleonic Wars, we read of Mrs Flustercuck-Hambinder's receipt of the news of her husband's decapitation-by-cannonball, in a font more suited to "A is for Apple."
So the problem with Comic Sans isn't, in my very-much-outspoken opinion, so much the web-page writers as the suppliers of the major operating systems. It's ten or twelve years, now, since the web turned the corner from being a geeks' paradise into something that non-geeks and, in particular, arty types—people interested as much, or more, in the style as the content—used by habit. And, I'd venture to guess, some sort of simulacrum of human- not machine-formed writing was one of the very first things they looked for, when putting up their decidedly non-geeky websites about non-technical stuff. And yet the OS suppliers seem to have ignored this demand completely; even though it was obvious the demand existed and was recognised, as evidenced by the number of cursive fonts bundled with the various office suites and graphics programs.
In other words, OS designers, it would be rather spiffing if you would bundle just one or two more cursive fonts as standard with your software, so that us web-users could all speak the same cursive language, so to speak.
So, anyway, what, after all that, would be my choice of font-family, to attempt to give the handwritten impression to as many readers as possible?
I'm going to assume that relative font-size isn't too much of a problem. In which case, I'd go with Lucida Handwriting as my first choice, it being common to about two-thirds of both Mac and Windows machines. Second choices; Monotype Corsiva (which isn't, unfortunately, longhand like the previous, but seems to be the best available), to catch as many Windows users as possible, and Zapfino, to do the same for Mac, along with the best chance for Linux; URW Chancery L. For the generic choice, I'd recommend not specifying cursive, even though that'd be technically correct, as the default cursive font on most machines will be the very same Comic Sans which we're trying to avoid. If you still really want that note looking like a note, you could consider adding some monospace choices, to give the impression of a typewritten note (while bearing in mind that that would be a no-no in Mrs Flustercuck-Hambinder's case if you're at all concerned with historical accuracy). Otherwise, I'd suggest just settling for appending the same font-stack as the main body of your text, so that it defaults to that—just describe Mrs Flustercuck-Hambinder as being in receipt of a handwritten letter. I'll go with the typewriter option for my example (for those who're interested in the CSS):
.handwriting { font-family:'Lucida Handwriting', 'Monotype Corsiva', Zapfino, 'URW Chancery L', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; }
Or, of course, you could get all geeky and (providing you have control of, and access to, the behind-the-scenes techy stuff, which, as a free-Word Press user, I don't), upload and embed a suitable font, so that all readers will see it presented exactly how you'd like them to. But that, Gentle Reader, deserves a slightly less meandering post of its own. Which should be, all going well, the subject of my very next post.
—Daz
[Okay, it was the very next post but one. Here it is, though.]
Cursive fonts installed on Mac, Windows and Linux systems. I’ve defaulted all the font-names to display in generic monospace if the font they represent isn't available, so it should be easy to tell which you have installed on your machine and which you haven't.
Font name | Installed (%) |
---|---|
Comic Sans MS | 99.56% |
MV Boli | 98.15% |
Monotype Corsiva | 83.06% |
Tempus Sans ITC | 74.34% |
Kristen ITC | 74.05% |
Mistral | 73.90% |
Freestyle Script | 71.37% |
French Script MT | 70.74% |
Bradley Hand ITC | 70.69% |
Vivaldi | 69.86% |
Lucida Handwriting | 68.35% |
Pristina | 67.77% |
Maiandra GD | 67.19% |
Edwardian Script ITC | 66.75% |
Blackadder ITC | 66.31% |
Segoe Script | 65.66% |
Segoe Print | 65.46% |
Lucida Calligraphy | 65.04% |
Viner Hand ITC | 64.65% |
Mongolian Baiti | 64.59% |
Gungsuh | 64.41% |
GungsuhChe | 64.41% |
Kunstler Script | 64.31% |
Vladimir Script | 64.31% |
Informal Roman | 64.07% |
Brush Script MT | 63.00% |
Script MT Bold | 59.25% |
Palace Script MT | 58.86% |
Forte | 58.67% |
Rage Italic | 58.57% |
Gigi | 58.28% |
Staccato222 BT | 10.52% |
ParkAvenue BT | 8.23% |
Calligraph421 BT | 7.94% |
Cataneo BT | 7.69% |
Rage Italic LET | 7.69% |
La Bamba LET | 7.64% |
Ruach LET | 7.59% |
John Handy LET | 7.55% |
Tiranti Solid LET | 6.96% |
One Stroke Script LET | 6.91% |
Smudger LET | 6.86% |
Andy | 3.80% |
Jenkins v2.0 | 2.92% |
GlooGun | 2.82% |
Pepita MT | 2.78% |
Fat | 2.63% |
Bickley Script | 2.00% |
DomBold BT | 1.75% |
Fine Hand | 1.75% |
Mercurius Script MT Bold | 1.75% |
A Charming Font | 1.31% |
Champignon | 1.31% |
Apple Chancery | 1.17% |
Mead Bold | 0.97% |
DecoType Naskh | 0.73% |
BudHand | 0.54% |
Textile | 0.10% |
Font name | Installed (%) |
---|---|
Comic Sans MS | 95.67% |
Apple Chancery | 95.43% |
Zapfino | 95.30% |
Brush Script MT | 93.82% |
PilGi | 77.64% |
Casual | 65.61% |
Lucida Handwriting | 60.07% |
Monotype Corsiva | 59.58% |
Adobe Arabic | 46.33% |
Textile | 5.93% |
Sand | 4.57% |
Caflisch Script Pro | 4.20% |
Adobe Garamond | 3.44% |
Shelley | 2.17% |
Porcelain | 1.91% |
Kaufmann | 1.66% |
Ryo Display Std | 1.61% |
Apple Casual | 1.27% |
Zapf Chancery | 0.74% |
Font name | Installed (%) |
---|---|
URW Chancery L | 99.01% |
Comic Sans MS | 68.44% |
Purisa | 63.70% |
Vemana2000 | 62.38% |
Domestic Manners | 12.80% |
AlHor | 6.11% |
Arab | 6.11% |
Dimnah | 6.11% |
Furat | 6.11% |
Graph | 6.11% |
Hor | 6.11% |
Nagham | 6.11% |
Rasheeq-Bold | 6.11% |
Tholoth | 6.11% |
AlMohanad | 3.82% |
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I never understood the criticism of Comic Sans. Yes, it is probably over used. There are many ways of badly designing a web page, and the over use of comic sans is only one of them.
Indeed. My current bugbear is the number of sites (FTB, for instance) designed with a fixed width, suitable for the wide screen owned by the designer, with no thought for those with older screens. All they need to do is define the main content-div’s width as a percentage but … argh! Stop me now!
Thinks: is Comic Sans really a cursive script? ‘Cursive’, to me, suggests longhand, joined-up writing, which Comic Sans obviously isn’t. Oddly, I’d not seen an example before – not even when someone on FTB has complained about it, as for some reason my Firefox just uses its default Liberation Serif all the time. I had to go into LibreOffice, find Comic Sans and type something. I can see why it’s disliked, but as you say, it has its uses.
I dislike ALL sans-serif fonts, as they blur the distinction between lower-case L(l), upper-case I and the figure 1.
Thanks to you, I’ve discovered that LibreOffice has at least one real cursive script, namely URW Chancery L. I might use it some time. Meanwhile, the main users of this kind of font seem to be charities, whose begging letters are designed to give the impression that some sleb has written to me personally.
BTW, having now looked at FTB on an older and smaller screen, I can see what you’re complaining about. Not that my usual screen is a wide one, just bigger (19″ rather than 15″).
May the fonts be with you.
Rustiguzzi, are you running Ubuntu as a partition on a Windows machine? ‘Cause if you are, you’ll be able to copy all Windows’ true type fonts and install them in Ubuntu. (If not, disregard the following.)
Search in the C/Windows/Fonts folder for *.ttf and copy all the files it finds to a new folder, then follow the instructions under the “Manually” heading at this page.
Hmmm . . . get fonts out of the Windows partition? Damn, never thought of that! Thanks. Yes, there’s a squashed WinXP partition in a remote corner of this PC, but for most of the time I use xubuntu – but I may well change to anticapitalista‘s AntiX which is on the linux-only back-up machine, as I’m getting to like it better.
With the fonts already available in the linux partition (including ttf-mscorefonts) there’s more than enough for my needs, including fonts in scripts I can’t even recognise, let alone read. Had a look in Windows/Fonts and couldn’t find the ones you mention, but I’ll bear them in mind and I’ve saved the “Manually” link.
Bad “this list” link.
mdoc7
It looks like the site no longer exists. Here’s a Wayback Machine archive for now. I’ll copy the table and append it to the post when I get time.
Thanks for letting me know.
You can get the ttf file direct from the Ubuntu software centre. There are also quite a lot of other fonts available there as well, although most are naff.
Thanks.
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