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I'm often curious to know what font a website is using. Using the inspector in Chrome or Safari I can easily identify the font-family style being applied, but that gives a list of fonts with no indication which one's actually being used.

For example, if I head for gov.uk in Chrome I can select a heading (at the moment there's one reading "Simpler, clearer, faster"), right-click and choose "Inspect Element", and see at a glance that it's using the following font-family declaration:

font-family: "nta","GDS-Regular",sans-serif;

But what I can't see is which of those fonts is actually being displayed.

It feels like the functionality I'm looking for must be in Chrome's inspector view somewhere and I'm just not looking in the right place. Is it?

(I know there are services like WhatTheFont that take an image and identify the fonts in it, but that's not what I'm looking for.)

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This isn't really an appropriate question for this community. This question was asked (and answered) on Stack Overflow if you're interested. – Kit Grose Oct 9 '12 at 5:07

closed as off topic by Kit Grose, Charles Boyung, Benny Skogberg, AndroidHustle, dhmholley Oct 9 '12 at 8:08

Questions on User Experience Stack Exchange are expected to relate to user experience within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.

1 Answer

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By default in most cases the first one used if available is used. Provided it's installed on your system. Most systems will be able to display the default font as it's a base font to the system.

If the font is not a normal one, usually it is included in the CSS with a @font-type.

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