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Synopsis: this page has sample alphanumeric and Lorem Ipsum text in sets of similar fonts, including: generic fonts (or proposed generic fonts);
user interface fonts; fonts similar to Arial,
Arial Narrow, Verdana, Verdana Condensed (if such a font existed), Times New Roman, and Palatino; and the Vista C fonts, monospace fonts for web pages, monospace fonts for coders, and serif fonts that could be used for body text. This is useful in creating font-family lists (font stacks)
with reasonable fall-backs.
NB: the correct fonts will not appear when the operating system performs font substitution; for example, Helvetica and Times will not appear in Windows because Windows substitutes Arial for Helvetica and Times New Roman for Times.
NB: characters in tiny sizes will not appear in the proper sizes if the browser has been configured to set a minimum font size.
NB: the text may appear slowly, because much JavaScript must be executed, and many embedded fonts must be downloaded; Chrome-based browsers were
particularily slow when this was written, in August 2018.
Subsections include:
NB: unlike most Browser News pages, this page is starkly plain, with minimal styling, partly to illustrate the points more clearly, but mainly to make it easier to compare browsers: viewing this page with several browsers and/or configurations at the same time makes the browsers’ basic differences clearer.
See also: other major pages in this site are Home, News, Find Browsers, Fonts, Resources, Stats, and Store.
See also: other pages in this site which are closely related include Fonts ⮞ Ampersands (very, very slow), Fonts ⮞ Choices, Fonts ⮞ Classics, Fonts ⮞ Coding, Fonts ⮞ Fluid Design & Sizes, Fonts ⮞ Free Fonts, Fonts ⮞ Icon Fonts, Fonts ⮞ News, Fonts ⮞ Metrics (very slow page), Fonts ⮞ Samples (slow page), Fonts ⮞ Weights,, Fonts ⮞ Possible Weights (slow page), Fonts ⮞ Richest Fonts (slow page), Fonts ⮞ True Weights (very, very slow page), Fonts ⮞ View String, Fonts ⮞ Weights, and News ⮞ Font News Archive.
This lists fonts similar to Arial, Arial Narrow, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Palatino, as well as the Vista C fonts, monospace fonts for web pages, monospace fonts for coders, and serif fonts which could be used for body text.
The fonts are listed in regular and italic variants, in three sizes: 1.00em, 0.89em, (the recommended small size in the proposed CSS 4 standard), and small.
NB: the sample text only appears below for fonts which are installed or embedded; the embedded fonts are .
Generic and proposed generic fonts may include .
User interface fonts may include .
Fonts somewhat similar to Arial include . Alegreya, Nunito, and Nunito Sans are noticeably lighter than the others, and therefore are somewhat less legible, less suitable alternatives to Arial.
Fonts somewhat similar to Arial Narrow include .
Summary: of the fonts similar to Arial Narrow, Fira Sans Condensed, Ubuntu Condensed, and Univers Condensed are a little darker.
Fonts somewhat similar to Verdana include .
Summary: all the fonts listed are good fall-backs for Verdana.
Fonts somewhat similar to Verdana Condensed — if such a font existed — include .
Summary: the closest to being a suitable font is Verdana Pro Cond, but Noto Sans Cond and Noto Sans Display Cond are also quite suitable.
Fonts somewhat similar to Times New Roman include .
Summary: all of these fonts are good fall-backs for Times New Roman.
Fonts somewhat similar to Book Antiqua include .
The fonts instroduced with Windows Vista whose names begin with C include .
Fonts which, like Courier New, are monospace fonts include , though stylistically many are unlike.
Fonts which, like Courier New, are monospace fonts suitable for coders include . Stylistically many are unlike, some with serifs, some without, many based on a parent font: for example, Fira Code is based on its parent, Fira Mono, which in turn is based on its parent, Fira Sans.
Some of these fonts are better because their characters are more legible and because their characters are so distinct that they are not easily confused.
It is especially important that punctuation marks and operators be large, and that similar characters such as B80Oo (capital B, digit eight, digit zero, uppercase O, and lowercase O),
1ilI (digit 1, lowercase I, lowercase L, and uppercase I), 5S$ (digit 5, capital S, and a dollar sign),
and brackets (parentheses (), square brackets [], braces {}, and pointed brackets <>) be distinct. I especially recommend the Office Code Pro font.
NB: because these samples are for coders, the samples consist of ASCII characters and code in four languages — HTML, JavaScript, C, and Perl — in a single font size and a single style, instead of Lorem Ipsum text in three sizes and two styles.
NB: another page, Fonts ⮞ Coding, is available which compares these fonts more concisely.
Fonts which, like Georgia, are reasonable candidates for serif body fonts include , though Clarendon BT is rather dark, and Playfair Display and Noto Serif Display are stylistically distinct. Georgia and Georgia Pro are optimized to be quite legible display fonts. The other fonts have tall characters with large x-heights, which makes them more legible as body text and in smaller sizes.
