Answer

In setting up the CMS template, we are sometimes asked to use a special or proprietary font.

The fonts you can use on a website are directly dependent on the fonts that are available on the visitor's machine. If they do not have the font installed, then the visitor will not see the design as you intended it. Most machines are preinstalled with dozens of fonts, the trick is knowing which fonts are likely to be installed on which computers.

There is a small subset of fonts that are likely to be installed on 99% of visitors' machines:



So in order to have our text display in as close a resemblance as possible to the intended style, we use a fall-back list system with first-choice, second-choice, catch-all font family names like "arial, helvetica, sans-serif". Note that font names with a space in them need to be wrapped in double or single quotes.