Common fonts for Windows, Mac and Linux?

[EduSerra]

Hello
I´m working on a theme design and I want it to be as identical as possible in all three operating systems. What are the fonts that I could use safelly that are common and available in those OS?

[chmaha]

For relatively good summary (albeit coming from a LibreOffice perspective): https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/cross-...nd-linux/46122

Not sure what to suggest given Linux by default will generally only come with open-source and/or license-free fonts installed. Windows and Mac do seem to have some overlap. But, as a Linux user myself, it is piece of cake to install whatever fonts are required by your theme. For example, the Win10 fonts are available on Github. However, they legally require the user to own a licensed copy of Windows.

And to be fair, I know next to nothing about the actual tweaking of fonts for REAPER themes and whether there are ways to provide for CSS-style "serif"/"sans-serif" generic families

[Rednroll]

I’ve been working through this lately as well. Found some info where there seems to be about 5-6 fonts which share common names which ship with Windows and OSX. Wish I owned a MAC so I could confirm.

I also looked through multiple MAC/PC compatible themes including defaults. Tahoma and Calibri seem to be most commonly used.

[DrKev]

Be aware that the same font can display differently on different OS's, e.g. vertical position and line length. There is no simple answer that will always work perfectly.

[Never]

So True Type fonts are a good start. You may try googling 'fonts that display the same across all os platforms' or something. It is best to use TT fonts and just include them in the zip with your theme. And then...as always...there will be little quirky issues with fonts, there are so many ins and outs to making fonts and there is no guarantee every character will show up the same between mac and win, like maybe the digits display differently, etc. Try to use newer fonts where possible. It would be great if you could find a newer TT family of fonts with all the variations like light, condensed, regular, mono, etc., so theres a variation for all the different elements. Just advice.

[Rednroll]

Originally Posted by Never

So True Type fonts are a good start. You may try googling 'fonts that display the same across all os platforms' or something. It is best to use TT fonts and just include them in the zip with your theme. And then...as always...there will be little quirky issues with fonts, there are so many ins and outs to making fonts and there is no guarantee every character will show up the same between mac and win, like maybe the digits display differently, etc. Try to use newer fonts where possible. It would be great if you could find a newer TT family of fonts with all the variations like light, condensed, regular, mono, etc., so theres a variation for all the different elements. Just advice.

Hi Never, thanks for your response. I had a couple questions I ran into while doing the Google search as you mentioned trying to identify common fonts between MAC and PC.

I also noticed other themes which included the fonts within their theme package as you mentioned but wasn't sure how they got used. Is there a folder we would place those fonts in within the theme resource folder or would the intent be to provide instructions for the user to install them on their system?

Here's what I was able to come up with so far within my research of common fonts between Mac and PC as well as some of the most commonly used fonts in other theme's including the Default theme. I wish I had a MAC to be able to test these out and see what happens when I use them to verify what does indeed work or not. At this time, I'm just relying on MAC users to post some screen shots for me.



Another thing I like to do is use Italic and Oblique styles of those fonts. For example, using the ?recarm scaler value, I like to use the oblique version of the font to show a visual difference of the track labels and track_IDs when a track is armed for recording. Unsure if MAC fonts support the oblique/Italic style when I set them that way on my PC. It has definitely been something I noticed being different when users have posted screen shots of my theme on their MACs where whatever replacement font is used doesn't contain the oblique/Italic style I intended.