Core fonts for the Web

Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings, all of them in TrueType font format packaged in executable files (".exe") for Microsoft Windows and in BinHexed Stuff-It archives (".sit.hqx") for Macintosh. These packages were published as freeware under a proprietary license imposing some restrictions on distribution.

Microsoft terminated the project in 2002, but thanks to the license terms, the distributed files are still legally available from some third-party websites. Updated versions of the fonts produced since 2002 have not been published as freeware and are usually available only after purchasing a license or as a part of some commercial products.

The fonts were licensed to Microsoft by Monotype Corporation or designed for Microsoft by Microsoft's own font designers or external designers. The fonts were designed to:

These design goals and the fonts' broad availability have made some of them extremely popular with web designers. However, these proprietary fonts (or some of them) are not distributed with some modern operating systems by default (e.g. in Android, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris or some Symbian versions) and they are substituted by other fonts (e.g. by free software fonts, such as Liberation fonts, Ghostscript fonts,Droid fonts, DejaVu fonts and others). All of these fonts in their latest versions are installed by default in the latest versions of Mac OS X (i.e. Mac OS X 10.4 and newer), but older versions of Mac OS X did not install some of them by default (e.g. Andalé Mono, Impact) and old versions of Mac OS also did not include many of them (e.g. Arial). Some of these fonts are also not installed by default in iOS (e.g. Andalé Mono, Comic Sans MS, Impact, Webdings).

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