#Microsoft sans serif for mac upgrade#
#Microsoft sans serif for mac android#

On Windows, you might find a more modern version of Arial called Arial Nova. Upgrading to Helvetica Neue is probably a better option overall than switching to Arial. by elongating crossbars and making punctuation marks heavier. It addresses some of Helvetica’s legibility issues, e.g. Mac and iOS also come with Helvetica Neue preinstalled.

#Microsoft sans serif for mac upgrade#

If you’re willing to sacrifice a little metrical compatibility, you can upgrade the default sans-serif fonts to more modern versions.

MacOS also ships with both Arial and Times New Roman. Arial is a re-interpretation of the classical Helvetica font (under a cheaper license). They improve character legibility over the original and tone down some serif-ornamentation. Tinos and Times New Roman, as the name suggests, are newer versions of the classic Times font. I’ll get back to Linux a little later in the article. The following table shows the default fonts on most operating systems except Linux. These fonts should be available on every operating system. PostScript version 1 required one serif font, Times and one sans-serif font, Helvetica. Let’s create a font stack that will look and behave nearly identical across platforms. However, it’s still possible to use these fonts across platforms.ĬSS lets you list multiple fonts in an ordered “font stack.” Web browsers will choose the first installed font they recognize from the list. Not every platform includes the exact fonts specified in the standard because of copyright issues and licensing costs. We can thank the PostScript printing standard for defining a core set of fonts that everyone had to support. This isn’t the same as a fixed-width font (monospace), where all the characters in the font have the same width. For example, a headline and paragraph should fill the same number of lines of text. Metrical compatibility means you can substitute one font for another in a document without affecting its layout. Metrically compatible means that each individual character in one font has the same width as the same characters in another font.

#Microsoft sans serif for mac android#

Android only has one font, so you get what you get. There are good options available for Linux too, but those are rarely set as the default fonts. The default fonts for the generic “serif” and “sans-serif” (without serifs) fonts are metrically compatible across MacOS, iOS, Windows, and Chrome OS.

In this article, I’ll focus on making the default fonts look and behave the same across operating systems. However, the default fonts differ between operating systems and few fonts are available everywhere. Different web browsers use the same default fonts on the same operating system.