What is compatible Font for both Linux and Windows by their default?

Question

What is compatible font that works in both Linux and Windows (in my case Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7) by their default (without adding any font addition in both OS)?

Solution

We'll start with two commands to get the available fonts

fc-list : family | sort -u > ubuntu-fonts
wget -qO- $H='Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5' $H='Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' $H='Connection: keep-alive' -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2' --referer=/ https://www.microsoft.com/typography/Fonts/product.aspx?PID=161 | grep -Po '(?<=FMID=\d{4}">)[^<>]+' | sort -u > windows-fonts

You could probably do something more clever if you were on Windows but I am not so I have to settle for grepping the online documentation.

I'm also running my version of this on a Ubuntu Live DVD.

Anyway we have two sorted files so we can just compare them to see which fonts exist in both files and we get our answer

$ comm -12 ubuntu-fonts windows-fonts
Symbol

So to answer your question: they share one font

But even then, I bet that's just a name clash.

This is obviously a problem for developers and designers. You want everything to look the same everywhere and not having a common base makes that a lot harder. There are a few options:

• Rasterise or vectorise your graphics so they're static graphics rather than text. Depending on the situation this might even be faster but it's also usually a lot less accessible. Screen-readers, for example, won't be able to parse them.
• If you can, use WebFonts or otherwise bundle the font along with your application. This will need a permissive enough license for the font you want to use so that could be expensive or limiting, depending on the fonts you use. It also uses more bandwidth but that hasn't stopped the web embracing them.
• Use similar fonts. There exist lists of near-interchangeable defaults but Graphic Design might be the place to ask.

Which of these best applies really depends on what you're doing... But it's impossible to realistically assume any one font will exist somewhere else.

You should also consider that the same font might not render the same in each situation. For example, there are various antialiasing techniques that make a web page look quite different from platform to platform.

It's really annoying.
All you can do is test try to make things as consistent as possible on any one platform.

Comments

[vaquito]

For what? Web pages? What if the user overrides your choice anyway?

[adadion]

Web application, the problem is while printing the report (exported as pdf) with dot matrix print, its became hard to read the print out. Even tough it is displayed nicely on the pdf file. I guess the problem is the font being override my client's win7. And i don't use WebFonts for this one.

[vaquito]

If you need very fine control, generate the PDF server side.

[adadion]

I like your answer, pretty details. So, I guess the only way to do is adding packages of font. Actually I have this problem because I change the font of the report format. Then it became messed up layout after clients try to print with dot matrix, it became hard to read, even though it displayed nicely on the pdf. I try to avoid adding any font package just to make it simple to implement, not 2-step works, on every jobs. Just want to make it simple, but work and all condition, esp. cross-OS and printer. Thank's by the way.

[adadion]

Forgot to tell, WebFonts pretty helpfull this day :)

[Oli]

@user68186 You can add whatever fonts you like (and there are a myriad, no pun intended, of ways of achieving that). But using your example, you're then you're in the situation where you have a dependency that requires the user to activate a repository to fulfil it. Including it with your application (if possible) is much more sane.

[Piskvor left the building]

@Oli: ...but then you need to check for license compatibility. Not convinced this is a saner territory ;) Just kidding, there's plenty of usable, license-compatible fonts for most licenses nowadays.

[adadion]

already have it on my other machine :) just want to simplify it if I want to develop on other machine, so I could do my job everywhere without depending on 'small' but 'enough affected' things like this. My best, at least for now, pick my fave WebFont collection.

[Fidel Pérez Menéndez]

Now fonts are at: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/index