Setting CSS font-family to a safe handwriting font

Question

In CSS, I usually go with the usual

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; 

For a little change, I'm going for a font that looks like handwriting. Can some of the expert CSS folks here suggest what would be some of the safest fonts (most widely available in most browsers) that look like handwriting?

Answer 1

Similar to sans-serif there is a generic cursive that it a "font that resembles handwriting". This will vary by browser (as will sans-serif) but could be a good place to start.

Here is a survey of script family fonts installed per user (year 2012):

Cursive font sampler and survey results

They all look significantly different from each other so you'd lose some consistency, but some are quite widely adopted.

Their main installed fonts are (FOR WINDOWS ONLY):

Comic Sans MS       99.13%   Monotype Corsiva    82.29%   Bradley Hand ITC    63.02%  Tempus Sans ITC     62.68%  French Script MT    62.39% 

Answer 2

You could use one of the Google web safe fonts: http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Schoolbell&subset=latin#code

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Schoolbell&v1" rel="stylesheet">  h1 {     font-family: 'Schoolbell', arial, serif;  }