Our website uses the Bodoni font, but to my surprise, it displays a completely different font on my friends computer. Why is this and what should I do?

Hi,

The reason why your Bodoni font doesn't display on your friends computer is that he doesn't have it installed. When you choose a font for your website it is important to use commonly installed fonts, to avoid that the browser of the user will have to substitute the font on your website with one that is available on their computer.

Attached is a list of the most compatible cross system fonts (meaning that if you choose a commonly installed font, you'll have a greater chance of your website displaying correctly on different computers):

1. Do not use absolute font sizes in your style sheets. Code font sizes in relative terms, typically using percentages such as 120% for big text and 90% for small text.
2. Make your default font size reasonably big (at least 10 point) so that very few users have to resort to manual overrides.
3. If your site targets senior citizens, use bigger default font sizes (at least 12 point).
4. If possible, avoid text that’s embedded within a graphic, since style sheets and font size buttons don’t have any effect on graphics. If you must use pictures of text, make sure the font size is especially large (at least 12 point) and that you use high-contrast colors.
5. Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site’s visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don’t recommend such a button for mainstream websites.
6. Maximize the color contrast between the text and the background (and do not use busy or watermarked background patterns). Despite the fact that low-contrast text further reduces readability, the Web is plagued by gray text these days.

It might also be related to the character encoding option. I do know from personal experience that if one person is on, say western ISO, they might not see what a website made with Unicode says. Sometimes it's a server issue related to that.

I don't recognize some of the more popular ones, at least by name. In my word processing, I tend to use Times New Roman and for some reason I thought it would have been a bit higher on the list.

I think I've seen the results of a browser using a substituted font when the intended one wasn't available.

I tend to stick to Arial for wesite stuff.. but my personal favourite is Comic Sans MS.

interesting that the bodoni font from the original question is not on Lorenz's list at all.