Font Settings
This site normally uses three fonts: a serif for body text, a sans-serif for headings and menus, and a monospace font for pre-formatted text and form fields. By default, these are Literata, Noto Sans, and Courier Prime, all loaded from Google Fonts. With this script, you may select different Google fonts or select local fonts on your device.
The fonts you may select were chosen on the basis of their popularity and legibility. Local fonts were chosen more for popularity and support on particular platforms. These include some famous typefaces that were popular for print in the 20th century and some of the better fonts you may find pre-installed on your device or computer. The Google fonts are chosen more for legibility on computer screens. Some of the features that make a font more legible are representing each character distinctly, looking good at small sizes, and fully supporting italics and boldface. For the sake of displaying coordinates, it is also important for numerals to have uniform heights matching that of capital letters. For the sake of legibility on a screen, I favored fonts with lower contrast between thick and thin lines, favoring old style or transitional serifs over didone fonts.
Local fonts are normally listed in fontlists, which are typically hidden in <DETAILS> boxes until you click on them. Some of the most popular fonts have many clones, and fontlists for them include several known clones. Selecting the list itself will give you the first font it finds in the list, but you may also look through the list and select one of the fonts in it. Fonts you can use will be displayed as themselves, and fonts you cannot use will be displayed in cursive. Google fonts will normally appear by themselves or at the top of the default fontlists. As long as you choose to use Google fonts, you should be able to use any of these.
Note that a few Google fonts resemble more popular fonts. Among the serifs, Crimson Text looks like Garamond, Lora resembles Palatino, and STIX Two Text looks like Times. In each case, I think the Google font looks better. Among the sans-serifs, Lexend resembles Futura, and Schibsted Grotesk and some others resemble Helvetica, but the Google fonts avoid letting different characters look like each other.
In case you would prefer to read sans-serif body text, which some people claim is better on screens, this script will give you that option. Noto Sans is probably better for headlines than for body text, but some of the other sans-serifs were chosen for how suitable they are for body text.
In case you have other fonts you want to use, you can select the serif, sans-serif, and monospace keywords as your fonts, then change your browser or OS settings to use the fonts you prefer for these. You may also suggest other fonts for inclusion on this page.