What fonts (if any) do you think I can assume will be on a indie-game-player's system?

Ariel? Verdana? Verdana seems like a standard web font that comes with IE.

Anyone know what fonts come standard with Windows these days? I got my PC with office pre-installed so I don't know which fonts were windows fonts and which ones were office.

Thanks all!

~Hanford

This is the list of available fonts as of Windows 98 SR/2. I'll double-astrix non-truetypes.

Ariel (and all its varients), Times New Roman, Courier, Courier New, Lucidia Console, MS Sans Serif**, MS Serif, Comic Sans MS, Century Gothic, Impact, Roman**, Script**, Smallfonts**, Symbol**, WingDings**

Fonts as of Windows ME/2K/XP and IE 5.0:

Trebuchet MS, Georgia, Verdana, Palatino Linotype, Webdings.

Fonts that come with Microsoft Office 95/97/2000 (astrix denotes 97/2000 only):

Letter Gothic, Century Schoolbook, Book Antiqua, Haettenschweiler*, Bookman Old Style*.

This is just off the top of my head pretty much, but I figure I've got at least a 95% accuracy rating on it. I used to have a bad motherboard that would corrupt my registry once a week or more, and during that time I reformatted and reinstalled various versions of windows no less than 200 times. You get to learn where every file on your computer originates from after that :)

Also, this list is only accurate for 98 SR/2 and up-- 95/98's fonts might not have included Comic Sans or Lucidia Console. Anyways, if you're using Windows fonts, you could always use the Win32 API's built-in heuristics stuff. If the specific font you request doesn't exist, windows will pick the closest likeness based on the 'description' (about 10 function parameters denoting style, size, etc) you provide.

- Air

Originally posted by Jake Stine
Anyways, if you're using Windows fonts, you could always use the Win32 API's built-in heuristics stuff. If the specific font you request doesn't exist, windows will pick the closest likeness based on the 'description' (about 10 function parameters denoting style, size, etc) you provide.

I've used Windows' font-matching and it's not very useful for games--usually, the font it selects will look out of place in the context of your game. On the other hand, it's nice to have *any* font rather than missing text or other worse problems. :)