Web Safe Fonts: The Safe List
Please don't use the <font> tag. It has been deprecated, which means at some point it will stop working. Instead as an alternative you can use a <span> tag with a style attribute like this... <span style="font-family: Impact">This is some text in Impact<span> ...or preferably set up a style sheet.
It's easy to change what font you want to use on your web page but to make sure it looks the same to everyone else as it does to you, it has to be done right. That means picking one of the fonts on the web safe list. As a backup plan you can also specify roughly what kind of font you want by defining what generic font family it should be.
You can choose one from the following list of generic font families: 'serif', 'sans-serif', 'cursive', 'fantasy', and 'monospace'. Here is an example of each of them:
serif ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
sans-serif ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
cursive ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
fantasy ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
monospace ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
There are nine web safe fonts installed by default on both Windows and Mac OS X. These are also available when using Linux but usually only if the "msttfonts" package has been installed. The nine web safe fonts are 'Arial', 'Arial Black', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Courier New', 'Georgia', 'Impact', 'Times New Roman', 'Trebuchet', 'Verdana'. Here is an example of each of them:
Arial ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Arial Black ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Comic Sans MS ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Courier New ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Georgia ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Impact ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Times New Roman ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Trebuchet MS ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Verdana ...The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog