No Georgia/Verdana without IE on the Mac?

MS discontinued free downloads of the core web font pack about, what, a year and a half ago? "Anyone using Microsoft products gets these installed anyway, and who doesn't use Microsoft products?"

Chances are an install of Office will clear it up. But buying a $400 package for web fonts?

I believe the license on the core web font pack was such that re-distributing them in their entirety, along with notices, was acceptable. Perhaps Apple had better wrangle with the legalities and just do it.

Agreed, although many, but not all, users will have *some* MS product on their Mac machine, I can see this being one of those confusing-phone-call-with-clients things.

We recently realized that my wife was missing some "standard" web fonts from her old PC as well (Palatino, Georgia) and we couldn't find anywhere to dl them.

what will happen to the state of type on the web ? well, apple should create its proprietary suite of web fonts, and users should be able to define custom styles to override page styles, so they can substitue verdana and co for the mac equivalents (assuming Safari allows for user styles ?)

Yes, Safari offers user styles. I, however, disagree that Apple should create a suite of PROPRIETARY web fonts, but rather that they should create and distribute a FREE set of web fonts (for MacOS, Windows, and *nixes), assuming they can match or beat the usability of Verdana and Georgia.

I have begun using the Bitstream Vera font set on both my Macs and my PC. It is very similar to Verdana but is open liscensed/source (I don't know all the gory details). It has a full set of Sans, Serif, and Monospaced typefaces. They are all very nice, and I imagine Apple and/or Mozilla even could/should incorporate these in some way into thier respective products.

http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
http://www.bitstream.com/categories/news/press/2003_bitstream/012203_gnome.htm

I tried not installing IE and had the same problem. Installing Office did fix it, though.

Here's some more detail on the missing Microsoft fonts:

http://www.exuberance.com/notes/2003/panther-fonts.html

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ is where I got those fonts from for my Linux installation. I guess it is possible to use them on Mac OS X as well.

Some of the comments above seem to misunderstand the issue: Apple can't just offer similar, equally usable and attractive options as Verdana and Georgia. Users need to have exactly those fonts. HTML pages that specify Verdana won't display properly with a nice-looking Apple replacement called "Stevedana" or something. THe only answer is for Apple to actually liscense the fonts and distribute them (ideally in a Software Update at some point).

This is a very valid concern. So much so, that I'm *sure* Apple has thought of it and will have a solution when the time comes (if they don't already). My guess is they'll just license the fonts and be done with it.

That said, there has been a "coming soon" page on Apple's site for Apple Typefaces for quite some time. I do think Apple plans on being in the font business at some point.

This is a big deal for Apple and their support of the web. While not written down in some W3C doc, those fonts might as well be web standards.

So many web pages (including my own) are designed with Verdana (or Georgia) in mind... knowing full well that a vast host of web users have those fonts. When designing with the finest pixel alignment in mind, I'll spec the font in the style sheet simply beacuse I know that a certain word in 11-pixel Verdana is going to be x-pixels wide and take up that much space on screen. While this can be argued as "bad-practice" by some standards, the fact remains that this is done a lot. If all of a sudden Verdana is gone, certain web designs are going to break for some users.

Using a font made popular in the 70s is probably not the best solution for fine-looking web design. I know Apple has vested interest in certain other screen fonts like Lucida, but they need to work out the details with Microsoft and get that fixed.

Why doesnt somebody who has the web fonts upload them to a public place and give everybody else the link. piracy solves everybodys problems :)

What is the world coming to when my choice of browser fonts is actually *decreasing*? This is just great.

The easiest thing for Apple to do would be to do exactly what Microsoft did with Arial (see this article for a good humored explanation). Basically create a set of substitutes for Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, and Georgia and set them internally in Safari as substitutes for their respective fonts. But unlike Microsoft's substitutes, Apple's would likely look better than the originals.

Actually they're freely available for download, legally. It should be a non-issue.

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Matt - The importance here is accessibility to large numbers of Mac users. Most users aren't going to seek out these fonts on their own. It's crucial that they be part of the Mac system install because they are web standards.

OK - who cares? Designers who rely on *fonts* are fools. Not everyone browses the web at the same resolution, with the same fonts sizes, as the designer. And you can't count on the user using your precious font even if they *do* have them - it can be overridden. I browse the web with Mozilla on Linux often, as well as via my Sony Clie.

I can't believe designers are still clinging to outdated design concepts. I couldn't care less if these fonts vanished. Screw any designer who relies on something as unreliable as the fonts installed. Follow the W3C WAI Guidelines, and the (X)HTML and CSS specs and try not to be so anal about perfection which is a lie anyway.

You can still get them in a free download - just download MSN for Mac OS X. They're all included. Just don't finish signing up for the service.

MSN for Mac OS X = Internet Explorer 6 for Mac. Check the user-agent if you're not convinced.

Oh, while I'm ranting...

Any designer who knows what they're doing should be aware that you can specify a cascading *list* of fonts to use, as well as a generic *family* to fall back on. So coding a page to specify one specific font is the designer's fault.

I still can't believe anyone is as foolish as to rely on fonts. Hell, I've seen the *same font* set to the *same size* render differently between platforms.

Agreed - that's what the CSS ability to specify different choices in a font list is for. I love Lucida, but I'm fully conscious that not everyone has it or will care to download it just to view my site, so I try to choose a "next best" choice within the few system-wide fonts available that won't signify a heavy compromise to the design. And if that fails on someone's computer, chances are s/he wouldn't tell the difference anyway between Times and Helvetica - in the end, what's truly important is that information still remains accesible to the viewer, which is the core purpose.

Mega,

I am known to speak in hyberbole as well, but c'mon: "Designers who rely on *fonts* are fools."

???

Users rely on designers to present their information in as readable of a fashion as possible. Now, designers don't always meet these expectations and that is their fault, but when I specify "Verdana" as my primary font, I am doing so because it has proven to be one of the most readable fonts for low resolution display. This isn't just my opinion... this more or less a fact for at least the plurality of web users out there. It is one of the few things Microsoft did perfectly, even if licensing issues now threaten that perfection.

I agree with you that designers should *of course* specify a full chain of font alternatives for their users, but having some licensing issue take away that very valuable and very deliberate first choice is disappointing. That's what people here are pissed off about.

And yes, I know you might be one of the discriminating few who specify your own fonts as a user, but please be aware that 99% of the public does not even know this ability exists, let alone how to pull it off. They take what we give them, and they may now be getting our second choice.

I'll refer back to my comment earlier about what Apple should do about this: Just create your own fonts which occupy the same metrics as Microsoft's, make them look even better, and then specify them as automatic substitutes. This should be fun for Apple because they can use font outlines and not just bitmaps. Let's not forget that bitmaps are the whole reason Verdana exists in the first place.

I agree Verdana is the best font I've seen. At least it's my personal favourite. But to be fair, the "a" does look kind of stupid on it.

That's all I have to say on the subject.

I'd like to advocate the use of Bitsream Vera.

I understand the concern of not having access to the core MS fonts, but until browsers elegantly support the '@font-face' css spec, we are forced to use commonly used fonts. If using MS fonts isn't a global option, we need to move on and use something that is. Bitstream Vera is free and open-source.

The other alternative is to see if Apple comes out with simiar fonts and adjust our style sheets accordingly...

I also made a clean install of X.3, and also chose not to install IE. Exactly the same surprise hit me. Well, I am quite new to Mac, so I didn't recognize it, as a problem connected to the IE. Now I know :)

Thank god for the Internet Archive for bringing out the dead:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010413112908/www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm

so, how about a user style like * { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", Verdana, Georgia, sans-serif; ! important} then...

I'm guessing that its an oversight more than anything else - perhaps just a detail that slipped by the QA testers (Jebus knows there are enough of these slip-ups at Apple!)

I'd say the best course of action would be to simply license the fonts and distribute them with the OS, as they do with many other fonts. I would consider Verdana, Georgia et al part of "web standards" at this point.

But I also agree with some of the above comments: how exactly do you rely on pixel perfect if you are spec'ing fonts in the CSS? In my experience that rarely works — line-breaks and such rarely fall in the same places and you've just got to allow for differences in flow, so allowing for different typefaces should be a part of ones general strategy as well.

Obviously this issue is part of the reason why CSS exists in the first place -- if a particular typeface isn't installed, the browser would use a second, third, or fourth option to render the textual content.

Where this fails however is that I have seen many style sheets where only "Verdana, Arial" and "Georgia" were used to mark up elements. For the sake of brevity, or file size, or laziness, they neglected to include "Sans-Serif" and "Serif" as backups if all other faces fail.

In this scenario, if a user didn't have any Microsoft tyypefaces installed, all text on the page would be rendered with the browser's default face. Which, would basically look like Netscape 4 when a style sheet is hidden from it.

"I’m *sure* Apple has thought of it and will have a solution when the time comes (if they don’t already)."

I agree w/ Jeff ... especially since Apple uses these fonts on their own site:

http://www.apple.com/main/css/fonts.css

I think Apple should do both - license the core Web font set *and* commission their own, more elegant set of replacements from Tobias Frere-Jones or Jonathan Hoefler. Hoefler Text is already included with OS X and a custom variant could be suitable Georgia replacement. After that, a systemwide Font Substitution pref would help solve this problem, not just for the Web but for all kinds of documents, too. A global "Map X to Y" list can't be that hard to implement as part of the type engine, can it?

Well noted Todd, although my default font looks ratehr nice: Optima on an Apple Cinema Display :) (Although I too sepcify Verdana in my minor web efforts -- I'm an architect, not a designer, although I am married une graphiste -- even I back that up with the sans-serif designation.)

I keep hanging onto IE for the Mac as it still solves the occasional Safari problem: no train tickets from SNCF and no movie tickets from allocine.fr.

I'd like to suggest Lucida Grande as preferable to Verdana on MacOSX. Verdana wasn't meant to be anti-aliased. Lucida Grande was.

Verdana was (and still is) a de facto standard, but the web changes. Operating systems change. We adapt.

I took the liberty of extracting the TTF files from the executables made available by the corefonts project and packaging them up for anyone on OS X. Feel free to download from my site.

As far as I can tell, this is perfectly in line with the EULA from Microsoft.

The web is supposed to be platform- and system-agnostic. The idea that Verdana et al are now "required" to view the web flies in the face of its purpose. As for "pixel-perfect" designs, you're expecting too much. It's as if a print designer spec'ed a hairline rule 1 point from the trim. You can't expect that kind of accuracy consistently.

I prefer to specify my own fonts for web viewing as well, since the vast majority of web pages are poorly designed. That said, I specify Verdana on my OS 9 machine's Mozilla, because of its readability and aesthetics. I also use Verdana for Eudora and AIM. However, I'm appalled by the thought of a bunch of Mac-using designers cheering on the Microsoftization of the web.

Side note: While I love Verdana as a 9 point bitmap font on my monitor, it was horrifying as two-foot-tall subtitles for the movie "Once Upon a Time in Mexico." I'm sure Matthew Carter never dreamt it would be used that way.

Here is an idea! Let's just all start developing in flash and grasp onto the idea of embedded fonts!

TA DAA!

tell me if I am worng, but the fonts would be on the OSX disks, no? Opening the packages that come with the installers should allow you to grab the fonts on their own. I'm off to try now.

All "breaking" considerations aside, what I see as a second vital concern is a much simpler one.

Verdana, Georgia, and their friends are quite simply the best screen fonts that we can RELIABLY call on. If we have to stop using them, even if there was zero transition trouble, the web as a whole would be less pretty and less easy to read.

sometimes i feel like my fulltime job is keeping up with software upgrades and designing is something i do on the side.

"sometimes i feel like my fulltime job is keeping up with software upgrades and designing is something i do on the side."

D I T T O -- this run down windows user concurs.

The core of this problem is that we only have a very few fonts (Verdana, Georgia, et al.) that we can reasonably count on being installed and that are truly great web typefaces.

But why? Distribution, that's why.

Even if Apple, Adobe, or anyone else were to come up with a new set of core web fonts and make them freely availble, how would everyone get them? We certainly can't count on average web users to go and download fonts, when they think their web experience is just fine as it is.

Verdana and the other MS collection fonts are pretty nice typefaces -- but the REAL reason they're so ubiqutious is that they come from Microsoft, the only software maker who owns a chunk of harddrive space on nearly every personal computer in existence. No other company can make that claim. Apple count come up with fonts, and distribute them with iTunes, or maybe QuickTime -- but this still wouldn't hold a candle to the number of Microsoft users. Maybe is Adobe bundled fonts with Acrobat Reader -- that might get us somewhere.

A new collection of web fonts would have to be distributed with software that is ubiqutios. What possibilities are there? What software exists on almost any PC?

This is the place to start, if we're serious about improving typography on the web...and we can take this approah whether we still have Verdana or not. Even if our favorites stick around, I'd still love to have a bit more choice -- wouldn't you?

Todd and Mega are on target here. The error is with the web-designer lazy enough to specify ONLY a Verdana, or Arial, or Georgia as a font call without specifying Sans-Serif or Serif. It's not Apple's job to help the lazy, and it's not MS's job to license their fonts to Apple if they don't want to. It sucks to have a poor user experience because of someone else's poor mark up, but maybe it will help web designers get more standards compliant. As someone else points out, Lucida is far superior as an anti-aliased face (see it in a variety of sizes and CSS calls at AIGA-LA. There's no native itals, but it is forced into an oblique fairly elegantly.

I'd like to start a discussion about how additional web-oriented typefaces could be mass-distributed. I've made aq small blog post on the topic here:

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/archives/000095.php

For the record, the latest version of StuffIt can extract the archives from the CoreFonts SourceForge site.

Also, the Mac Classic versions of the fonts are still available at http://beebo.org/corefonts/; they seem to work better in Carbon apps, but as a result they also lack the internationalization of the Windows versions.

Tom-

I think you're sort of missing the point. Everyone here would agree that web developers should specify a family such as sans-serif or serif after their font list. This isn't about standards, or accessibility. It's about have a decent selection of beautiful, screen-oriented typefaces to choose from when we design.

We all know that our pages will still be accessible (if we specify sans-serif), even when the user doesn't have Verdana. But, we care how our page looks, and part of that is having beautiful, readable fonts. We don't want to "settle" for the fact that if the person doesn't have Verdana, it'll render in Arial -- we want them to just have Verdana, so we don't have to deal with it.

It'll never be 100%. Never. We know that, and we can deal with it. But, the current situation is that almost everyone has these core fonts. Pulling IE on the Mac threatens that, and we need a solution. It's not the end of the world, becuase we'll still see the content in a different typeface -- but if the designer wanted me to see Verdana, then I'd like to see Verdana, thank you very much.

Jeff, I hear what you're saying, I hear your point. What I'd respectfully counter is that expecting, or even wanting, the sort of typographic control that you have in print on the web is a deeply flawed way of thinking. Sure, it would make it easier on web developers if everyone had the same set of fonts or used the same browser ... but that's not the way it is, or the way it's likely to be anytime soon. You've got to embrace the fact that designing for the web is a fundamentally different animal. There are plenty of differences in the way things render from Win98 IE to Safari to Linux to OS9 IE to XP to Opera, etc ... different platform-specific fonts are just another variable among many --- and I'd expect this list to grow not shrink.

That said, there are also viable 'beautiful, readable' alternatives to Verdana on the Mac, and as someone mentioned above Verdana and their ilk are pretty poor as anti-aliased fonts. I'm sure you've noticed that Apple and Safari are moving towards a completely anti-aliased user experience. I'd encourage you to move with them. I agree that MS has had an edge in their attention to type details in the last decade (good parallel thread going on at Typographica).

I would expect Apple to come with their own set of official faces, like Lucida Grande, which create a differentiated Apple vibe. Bring it on I say, I'm sick to death of 9px Verdana.

Tom-

Thanks for your thoughtful post.

Let's look at this from another angle for a second. Forget about you me the web designers, and think about you and me the web users. Even if you're sick to death of Verdana (and I am too, frankly), don't you want to see Verdana if that's what the designer intended for you to see? I do. I may not like MS Comic Sans one bit, but if the "designer" wanted me to rad their page in Comic Sans, then I think I should -- at least initially. If I decide it's unreadable or I just hate it, I can always implement a user style sheet.

I'd like to see things the way the designer intended for me too. We all know that 90% of the pages out there use Verdana. That means I need Verdana. It's a must-have. Period.

Jeff, your "I’d like to see things the way the designer intended for me to," comment is a way of thinking that frankly has to evolve. There is no THE way on the web, and there never has been. There have always been other browsers, people without proper fonts, people with 256 color settings, etc. Web designers and web project managers have historically been faced with the choice of deciding to worry about those 'minority percentage' people or not. Some sites remain horrendously browser-specific, some sites platform-specific. I see platform and browser differences as just a reality of the web, and one that designers need to rise to the challenge of addressing. MS owns Verdana, etc. just like they own WindowsMedia. If MS chooses to make specific proprietary efforts available for MS product users only I think that's their right. As far as me suffering as a web surfer because the web will get uglier ... well, I'm not too worried about it. The web is ugly as hell for the most part already, and each new ugliness is motivation for new innovation. As I've mentioned, I think it's high time for Verdana to be put out to pasture. If there has to be a pain period before there's something better, so be it.

I see your point, and hereby change my position from "I'd like to see things the way the designer intended me to," to...

"I'd like to see things as close to the way the designer intended as possible."

I do understand that it's not currently possible to show every viewer the exact same page with the exact same colors, fonts, layout, etc. But...I don't see why we shouldn't strive to get as close to that holy grail as possible.

Simple Jeff, you can see things exactly as the designer has intended, with one requirement: The designer has had to have been as thorough as possible in providing an "intended" CSS scheme for multiple platforms. It's going to be the designers fault if they lazily intend for Mac 10.3/Safari users to see sites in Verdana [only], because Verdana might not be there. Designers have to abandon the concept of one intended master scheme, and you have to stop imagining there actually is only one intention. WDIK looks quite different on Mac/Safari and PC/IE, but they are both quite satisfying (nice job Todd). Todd might prefer one look to the other, but the reality is there are always going to be multiple looks (screen resolutions, gamma, fonts, browsers, funky browser addons, etc) and this is the way web designers (working in HTML) have to approach the process. It doesn't mean things have to get uglier. It does mean it's a more complex job.

Tom-

I think you're being way too ideallogical and not realistic enough. Take a look at my site, if you like -- I specify fonts for all platforms. I repeat, this is NOT about me as a designer wanting my site to look good. I'm cool with how it looks on every platform under the sun.

What is IS about is me, the user, having to suffer becuase there are lazy designers out there. I can turn up my nose and say, "this designer sucks because he/she assumed I'd have Verdana and I don't," but that doesn't make it any easier for me use the websites, does it?

And let's faceit -- 99.9% of the web users won't even REALIZE they don't have Verdana now -- they'll just wonder why the hell everything looks so bad all of the sudden.

Blame the designers if you want, but that's not goingg to correct the thousands of web pages designed with Verdana in mind when they're viewed on a machine without Verdana.

A few points: Verdana is not the end-all be-all of web fonts; as cel-phones and handhelds become more common for web browsing, fonts will not matter; and most importantly, Microsoft is not going to release another web browser for at least three years, when Longhorn finally comes out. That is plenty of time for Mozilla to gain ground, especially since the Gecko engine is currently the most standards-compliant browser at this time. In the meanttime, perhaps the Mozilla Project can start bundling open source fonts like Vera. As more and more users jump onto the Mozilla bandwagon due to the performance and compliance gains, something like Vera can easily become the de facto standard.

The bottom line on this topic, to me is this:

Verdana, love it or hate it, IS the de facto standard web font. It's everywhere. To snatch it away from users now would be much the same as deciding users can only view 256 colors.

I'm not saying most every page using Verdana is the way it SHOULD be -- but it's the way it IS, and if you deny that, you're not being realistic.

It's come to be an integral part of the web, and Apple (and whoever else is involved here) should do everything in their power to ensure that their users don't miss out on a core piece of the web as we know it.

Jeff, I'm not sure why you think doing anything about it is in Apple's power, as they don't own the intellectual property in question. Apple is not 'snatching away' anything from anyone. Sure Cupertino can make a fair offer to MS to license Verdana and Arial, etc. but MS can always just say, "No thanks, those fonts are MS property and reserved for people who support our software (by at least installing it)." Frankly, this is the type of response I'd expect from Redmond. This isn't something Apple has ever had control over or ever will. I would suspect they'll make some effort and some proposal to MS re: these fonts, but I don't expect Apple to be too worried about it. I'd imagine Mr. Jobs would say that Apple seems to be doing just fine releasing default system-bundled fonts that are superior to Windows system fonts in almost every way. Verdana? Good riddence. Ugly looking sites? Who cares — there are 8 zillion of them already. Designers, get better. That idea I like.

I didn't mean to put the blame quarley on Apple -- MS clearly has a role here, too.

Anyway, Tom: good discussion. Think we'll just have to agree to disagee. It's been fun. Cheers! :)

Jeff

The fonts still exist online for free.

Once upon a time -- back in ancient history when there was competition in the web browser market -- I used to remember one of the features that Netscape and Microsoft were touting was embeddible fonts. Netscape had some embedded software made by Bitstream, while Microsoft had there own system for IE. The idea was that the font infomation would be stored on the server, and the browser would download the font data along with the HTML markup and images and whatever else would be required to make the webpage.

What I wish to know is why did that idea die away?

Oh man...
I'm getting so tired of this. It's all politics again.
Another plus+ for flash, if we like it or not.

Yup. Standards? If you don't make it restricted enough things like this are bound to happen. One + for flash from me too.

Wes-

The idea of on-the-fly downloads of fonts hasn't really died away (it's actually in one of the CSS specs, I believe), but it lost a lot of steam when font foundries started expressing serious concerns about font piracy. Also, the fact that there were two competing methods hurt the concept.

Jeff

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/mac.htm?fname=%20&fsize=

ahem.

Typeface design is not covered under US copyright law. Fonts are considered "useful articles" which mix utility with design and must be patented, not copyrighted, which is extremely hard to do with fonts, so nobody does. Useful articles are explicitly excluded from copyright under the law, and the legislative history of the law and subsequent court decisions have affirmed that fonts cannot be copyrighted. Adobe claims that their fonts are "computer programs" written in PostScript, which can be copyrighted, but their confidence in this theory is so weak that they have never taken anybody to court lest the cat be let out of the bag if they lost.

Therefore: Apple should just hire someone (such as Bigelow & Holmes, who did Lucida and the Geneva/Monaco outline fonts) to copy Verdana. As long as the PostScript point coordinates are different by a few millipoints, even under Adobe's crackpot theory the stuff would be legal.

The only problem: the name Verdana is protected under trademark law.

Use Flash, it embeds any font you wish without needing it installed on a user's system.

"I can’t believe designers are still clinging to outdated design concepts. I couldn’t care less if these fonts vanished. Screw any designer who relies on something as unreliable as the fonts installed. Follow the W3C WAI Guidelines, and the (X)HTML and CSS specs and try not to be so anal about perfection which is a lie anyway."

Well said. People who think they have control over these things don't understand the web at all.

well lets see, ive done some research and microsoft and apple have a contract (WHOA WHERED THAT COME FROM!?!?!?!) apparently microsoft is allowed to use apple like icons under the contract (hence the lack of a lawsuit, i hate stupid ceo's) and in turn apple would include ie on every one of their operating systems (i think ms got a better deal) theres also some other stuff but its completely unrelated

LoL. Okay. I recently installed 10.3 Panther on a new computer, and like some of you, opted out of the MSIE install. I even caught myself expecting to find Verdana when I was setting up my IM program.... However, what I found funny about this thread was that *nothing has changed* (yet) regarding the way the MS Web fonts become installed. In earlier Mac OS X versions, Mac OS 9, and earlier, they were installed by Microsoft products, not as part of the OS install. (Remember Microsoft First Run? ...and it still does its thing from inside the IE.app package.) What *has* changed is that for the first time since the dawn of the post-<blink> era, some of us didn't see a need to install a Microsoft web browser :) Hi, I'm Robert, and I'm a Verdana specifier. (With plenty of fallbacks.)

Can any Panther users report on which font(s) would be a good substitute to include in the css font-family hierarchy as a fallback for Verdana? Currently, I set the font-family to Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, and Sans-Serif, but I'm wondering if there's a better choice for a Verdana replacement on the newer Macs.

Thanks.

I’m wondering if there’s a better choice for a Verdana replacement on the newer Macs.

There is -- Lucida Grande. It's the default sans-serif face of OS X, and a gorgeous one at that. I would highly recommend using it. That said, because the typeface is a two-word name, you should wrap it in quotes if you use it in a style sheet. As in:

font-family: "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;

Thanks Todd!

I'm with Todd. For almost all web projects, I use CSS to specify fonts in this order:

“Lucida Grande”, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif

Mac OS X users will see Lucida Grande, and Mac OS 9 and Windows users will see Verdana, Arial, or their default sans-serif.

This way, Mac users running OS X get the Lucida Grande, which looks freakin' awesome. Look at a web page using Lucida Grande on a Mac OS X machine and compare it to a Windows machine where it will show Verdana, and I think you'll agree that the Mac browser showing anti-aliased Lucida Grande looks dramatically better.

NOTE that we specify Arial as a fallback sans-serif, not Helvetica. This goes back to the OS 9 days -- Arial (common on PCs but less so on Macs) simply had cleaner bitmaps than Helvetica (Helvetica would only be on a PC if the user was a designer and bought it).