Web-safe fonts

Practically every personal computer has a set of fonts installed. These fonts are usually the default fonts for the operating system that the computer is using or come with software added by the user. Therefore, different computers can have very different sets of fonts installed. If you are designing a webpage, or sharing documents between computers (and particularly if the document will move between PC and Mac), you need to keep this in mind. If you decide to use a font on your web page that a visitor doesn't have, that font will appear differently (and often unattractively) on the visitor's machine. This is where web safe fonts come in. Web safe fonts are a set of highly common fonts that come installed on most computers. Here is the list to help you on your way:
Serif: Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Courier, Garamond, Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times New Roman, Times.
Sans Serif, Arial, Arial Black, Geneva, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, MS Sans Serif, MS Serif, Symbol, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Verdana, Webdings, Wingdings.
Incidentally, many type faces have equivalents under different names, simply published by a different type foundry. You can often tell which are equivalents because the names have some common connection. Arial and Helvetica are equivalents (although I can't find a connection between the two words in this case). But Swiss and Geneva are also equivalents to Helvetica, which is easy to pick if you were ever a stamp collector, as Helvetia is the word for Switzerland that appears on their stamps. Similarly, Times and New York are equivalents (Times was designed originally for the New York Times newspaper).