Editing Core fonts for the Web (section)

==Overview==
The fonts were licensed to Microsoft by [[Monotype Corporation]] or designed for Microsoft by Microsoft's own font designers or external designers.{{Citation needed|date=April 2023}} The fonts were designed to:
* Be highly legible on screen;
* Offer a wide range of typographic "timbres" within a small number of typefaces; and
* Support extensive internationalisation.{{Citation needed|date=April 2023}}

These design goals and the fonts' broad availability 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 (operating system)|Android]], [[Ubuntu (operating system)|Ubuntu]], [[FreeBSD]], [[OpenBSD]], [[OpenSolaris]] or some [[Symbian]] versions)<ref>{{cite web |url=http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/fonts/ |title=Software Packages in "lucid", Subsection fonts |accessdate=2010-07-02}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/x11/ |title=Software Packages in "lucid", Subsection x11 |accessdate=2010-07-02}}</ref> and they are substituted by other fonts (e.g. by [[free software]] fonts, such as [[Liberation fonts]], [[Ghostscript fonts]],<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-UnixResults.shtml |title=Linux and Unix family font survey results |accessdate=2011-06-28 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629121917/http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-UnixResults.shtml |archive-date=2011-06-29 |url-status=dead }}</ref> [[Droid (font)|Droid fonts]], [[DejaVu fonts]] and others). All of these fonts{{Which|date=April 2023}} 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 even older versions of Mac OS also did not include many of them (e.g. Arial).<ref name="apple-infoweek" /><ref>{{cite web |url=http://home.earthlink.net/~bobbau/platforms/MacArialFonts/ |title=Improving Appearance of Arial Font on the Macintosh |author=Bob Baumel |quote=One of the most widely specified fonts is Arial, a basic sans-serif font which is always present on Windows systems, but only sometimes on Macintosh computers, and hardly ever on UNIX systems. |date=1999-10-27 |accessdate=2010-12-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110615072320/http://home.earthlink.net/~bobbau/platforms/MacArialFonts/ |archive-date=2011-06-15 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2444?viewlocale=en_US |title=Mac OS X 10.3: Fonts list |date=2008-07-24 |accessdate=2010-12-05}}</ref> Some of these fonts are also not installed by default in [[iOS (Apple)|iOS]] (i.e. Andalé Mono, Comic Sans MS, Arial Black, Webdings).<ref>{{cite web |url= https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/ |title=System Fonts |accessdate=2024-01-28}}</ref>

While the project has formally ended, the benefits of using broadly available fonts remain: to increase the likelihood that content will be displayed in the chosen font, or in a [[metric-compatible]] alternative. Eventually, modern [[Web browser]]s added support for embedding [[web fonts]] (especially the [[Web Open Font Format]]) over the course of the 2010s, allowing the real-time downloading and display of fonts that the Web designer specified. Thus the "core fonts for the Web" became [[technologically obsolete]], since the package was never licensed for Web embedding and a majority of websites as of 2020 use embedded Web fonts instead.<ref>Richard Fink (2016-09-06)[https://alistapart.com/article/webfonts-on-the-prairie Webfonts on the Prairie], Alist Apart</ref>