Here is how this new system font stack is used across different websites. Modern system typefaces look better on both new high DPI screens, and old screens alike. Arial was first created in 1982, and has served the web well for decades. This is a font that very well could be installed on a Mac user's device, but since the font stack started with the more specific -apple-system, we don't have to worry about this conflict. Our original font stack used Arial across macOS, iOS, and Windows.

This will certainly only be applied to users on an iOS or macOS device. For example, the first font defined is always -apple-system. We do this by starting with the most specific fonts possible, and moving on to fonts that are less guaranteed to be tied to a specific device. This means that we have to craft the stack in such a way that the first font available to the user is their system font, and not some font they have installed on their machine. Because we are just passing font names to the property, the font that will be used is the first font available on the user's machine that matches that name. The order in which the fonts are defined in the font-family property is very important. These are the different fonts that have been used, and the devices (and browsers) they target - Font However, the fonts used by different sites, although not exactly the same, overlap. The default web fonts (Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, and Arial) have been dropped in Bootstrap 4 and replaced with a native font stack for optimum text rendering. The Font StackĪt the moment, there is not one universally-used sequence of fonts for this system font stack. any text styled in Arial would still appear in Arial on the Axure RP canvas.

With this method, the fonts used by different systems are explicitly called themselves in the font-family property. Use web fonts to ensure that your prototypes custom fonts render correctly. Relatively recently, some websites and web applications have been adopting a new method for using system fonts in the browser. This means that we cannot use it in a list of font families with fallbacks or as a fallback itself. These keywords can be useful, but they also have some drawbacks, the main one being that they only work with the shorthand font property. A few months ago, I wrote about how you can use system fonts in the browser using the built-in keywords that work with the font shorthand property (see Using System Fonts in the Browser).

Arial font stack