Tahoma font family

[mmcgu1966]

It seems that every time I look-up the font-family for Tahoma, nobody can agree on it’s font-family. Currently I’m using:

_font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,Kalimati,sans-serif;_

but wanted to see if we could come up with a ‘best answer’ to one of life’s most pressing questions.

[chrisburton]

@mmcgu1966 Are you talking about the actual font family (regular, bold) or font stacking?

[chrisburton]

@mmcgu1966 I’m not following what you’re saying.

[chrisburton]

Wow. That’s a bit crazy with font stacking.

[chrisburton]

I read it but we’ve come a long way since 2009.

[joshuanhibbert]

@mmcgu1966 What do you mean by a font stack that targets Tahoma? Technically speaking, that font stack targets Frutiger and falls back to Tahoma/Helvetica/sans-serif if required.

If you want a Tahoma specific font stack, then something like this would work well (taken from http://cssfontstack.com/):

font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif;

In terms of choosing a font stack, there is no perfect answer, so I wouldn’t be too worried that everyone doesn’t agree. Simply choose a stack that works well for you. Try and choose fonts that have similar character widths and x-heights, and have good OS support.

[chrisburton]

I agree with Josh, Verdana is a perfect choice for a fallback to Tahoma. You should look into web fonts. If you’re looking for text type I would recommend Webtype.

Most importantly I would find similarities between the glyphs, not just width and x-height.

[Author]

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