Core fonts for the World Wide Web

TrueType: The best solution
Microsoft's TrueType based strategy is aimed at solving the various problems associated with displaying fonts on the World Wide Web. Additional information about our strategy is available from our Hot topic: fonts on the Web page.

Specifying fonts for Web pages
Since its release in August 1995, Microsoft Internet Explorer has supported typeface choice through the FONT FACE extension to HTML. This feature is explained in our Fonts in Microsoft Internet Explorer page.
However, it has been difficult for authors to fully exploit this feature, as they can not be sure which fonts a Microsoft Internet Explorer user will have installed on their system.
This is where the Web Font Pack will come in. The pack will provide a range of high quality TrueType fonts which Apple Macintosh and Windows users can download and install free of charge. Web page designers can specify these fonts for use with their pages in the knowledge they are freely available to any reader.

Web font sets
As a initial step Microsoft is making a number of font sets available for you to download, install and use. Furthermore you can freely distribute these sets from your own site. To see how this might work in practice see our Comic Sans Café page.
At present these sets are only available in Windows TrueType format. Apple Macintosh TrueType versions will be available shortly. Even if you have Windows 95 installed, we recommend that you upgrade to these versions of Times New Roman, Courier New and Arial.

A screen capture taken from Microsoft Internet Explorer for
Windows 95 showing the fonts included within the font sets.

Each self-extracting executable file contains the TrueType fonts listed, instructions on how to install them and an end user license agreement.

arial.exe [397KB self extracting archive]
Contains; Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic and Arial Bold Italic.

ariblk.exe [81KB self extracting archive]
Contains Arial Black.

comic.exe [102KB self extracting archive]
Contains Comic Sans MS and Comic Sans MS Bold.

courier.exe [457KB self extracting archive]
Contains; Courier New, Courier New Bold, Courier New Italic and Courier New Bold Italic.

times.exe [485KB self extracting archive]
Contains; Times New Roman, Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Italic and Times New Roman Bold Italic.

Be sure to add this page to your favorites list, as new font sets will be made available as soon as Web versions are complete.

The WGL4 Character Set
All of the fonts provided, with the exception of MS Comic Sans and MS Comic Sans Bold, include the full Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) character set. This character set contains 652 characters and covers multiple writing systems including Western, Central, and Eastern European, as well as characters required by Greek and Turkish.
For detailed technical information about character sets and codepages please see our Character sets document. The WGL4 character set is listed in Chapter 4 of the TrueType 1.0 Font File Specification

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