This is a pretty basic question I guess. If you use a font on a website, it will only be displayed as you intend if the browser its seen on has access to the same font, right?

I'm sure I've seen websites displaying fonts that weren't intended before.  

If this is the case, I realize you could save text as an image to display an obscure font that way.

There is a limited number of browser-supported fonts. For example, you're not going to be able to use your 'Old English Graffiti' font on a web page, unless, as you said, it's embedded as an image.

Here is (I believe) the complete list of standard browser fonts:

Windows fonts - Mac fonts- Font family

Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif

Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS5, cursive

Courier New, Courier New, Courier6, monospace

Georgia1, Georgia, serif

Impact, Impact5, Charcoal6, sans-serif

Lucida Console, Monaco5, monospace

Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif

Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua3, Palatino6, serif

Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif

Times New Roman, Times, serif

Trebuchet MS1, Helvetica, sans-serif

Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif

Symbol, Symbol (Symbol2, Symbol2)

Webdings, Webdings (Webdings2, Webdings2)

Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats (Wingdings2, Zapf Dingbats2)

MS Sans Serif4, Geneva, sans-serif

MS Serif4, New York6, serif

1 Georgia and Trebuchet MS are bundled with Windows 2000/XP and they are also included in the IE font pack (and bundled with other MS applications), so they are quite common in Windows 98 systems.

2 Symbolic fonts are only displayed in Internet Explorer, in other browsers a font substitute is used instead (although the Symbol font does work in Opera and the Webdings works in Safari).

3 Book Antiqua is almost exactly the same font that Palatino Linotype, Palatino Linotype is included in Windows 2000/XP while Book Antiqua was bundled with Windows 98.

4 These fonts are not TrueType fonts but bitmap fonts, so they won't look well when using some font sizes (they are designed for 8, 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 point sizes at 96 DPI).

5 These fonts work in Safari but only when using the normal font style, and not with bold or italic styles. Comic Sans MS works in bold but not in italic. Other Mac browsers seems to emulate properly the styles not provided by the font (thanks to Christian Fecteau for the tip).

6 These fonts are present in Mac OS X only if Classic is installed.

Thanks for the information. I didn't realize that there was sort of an "industry standard" with this much detail.

Of if you're really insistent about your obscure font, you could ask your visitors to download the font that you're using. But I doubt any'd go through that kind of hassle.

Really dude, I've faced with this problem many times. It makes me irritate when I try to do something fantasy for my site with different fonts It displays the site with Arial font in my friend's PC. I hate this thing and then I will change the font in my site to the standard fonts as listed above.

You can put in your CSS file the font that you want to display, and put sans-serif or serif after it. And if the user doesn't have that font installed, the users default sans-serif or serif font would display.

This is a common problem but the responses listed above are the best way to deal with it. My rule of thumb is always just using images so that the font cannot change through any browser settings. It also makes editing your pages easier in my opinion just because there is less code clutter to deal with.

I agree with the others here in saying that fancy fonts should be used in images. NO website visitor is going to download a font just to read your content in a font that will be actually more difficult to read. For text, I find you should stick with the standards - I live Verdana mostly. Fancy fonts are best for buttons, headlines, and graphics.

[quote] This is a pretty basic question I guess. If you use a font on a website, it will only be displayed as you intend if the browser its seen on has access to the same font, right?

I'm sure I've seen websites displaying fonts that weren't intended before. [/quote]

Speaking of incorrectly displayed pages, what if someone uses one of the font size adjuster buttons? Does that mess up fonts at all in the display when they get enlarged? I'm thinking about if you were creating a site for example aimed at a retirement community where more people may use that function - would a certain type of font style be a better choice than another?