PC fonts

John,

You can never go wrong with Times or Times New Roman. In my experience, it's never failed to translate perfectly for Windows users.

-Dennis

I believe there are dingbat fonts that most PC users are likely to have, but I can't recall the names &, unfortunately, don't have time at work this week to check.

If you're just wanting to send the document to a PC user & he/she doesn't need to edit it, why not export as a PDF & send that? OS X will imbed any fonts & you can be (almost) guaranteed of the document looking just as you created it. With the differences of fonts & display (72 dpi vs 96 dpi) betweem Macs & PCs, even with fonts of the same name, there is no guarantee. I've created a number of PDFs from Pages documents & they appear on my work PC just as I made them on my Mac.

Too bad. You might send the PDF anyway so the user can see what you see & any changes in layout could be taken into consideration.

While there are certainly no guarantees, Webdings, Wingdings, Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 should be present on a standard Windows install with Microsoft Office. Here's a tip: open FontBook, select the font you're interested in then choose Preview>Show Font Information. A good number of the Monotype fonts and almost all the fonts which say "designed by/ copyright/ trademark of Microsoft Corporation" are likely to be present on a standard PC install (think about putting these in a "Windows Fonts" collection for future reference). Again: this is by no means a guarantee of font parity or even font compatibility, just a good place to start when trying to choose cross-platform fonts.

(On an aside, depending on your circumstances and clients, don't be afraid to use the best fonts available for the task and encourage others to match your fonts if they need to edit the documents. While maybe not appropriate in this instance, don't limit yourself to Arial or Times New Roman or Webdings if they're not appropriate, just because others aren't aware of anything different/better. It's just better than spending your whole life apologising to people because THEY don't have the right fonts.)

I have run with webdings.

One thing about webdings is that it uses the Private Use area of Unicode and shares this with numerous other fonts, including the 3 Wingdings. Hopefully at the receiving end the apps will all use Webdings, but if they don't, your symbols from that font may look rather different than planned. (You may be able to see this by switching your font to Wingdings for example). If for some reason your doc needed to be transformed into Plain Text, where fonts are not stipulated, it is impossible to tell what would appear. Or if it needed to be used by non-Unicode-savvy apps like Word v.X at the receiving end, things might not work right.