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If they are on an ancient browser let them burn.

dolphone bubleine
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    Aren't web-safe fonts the ones installed in all OS? Did you mean render-safe? – Yisela Sep 19 '12 at 04:03
  • it appears as though the initial abusive and negative comments from the moderators were removed. -- also my comments were removed. – dolphone bubleine Sep 22 '12 at 00:19
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    I would vote to re-open this question. It is an incredibly important issue for web-designers, and it is not an easy find on Google. In addition, this is not a tool or library, and while it may end up being an offsite resource, it is no more a request for an offsite resource than most other requests I find on this site. – dgo Oct 05 '14 at 19:55
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    Similar: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2130790/what-are-cross-browser-cross-platfom-web-safe-fonts – Vadzim Jan 16 '18 at 18:58

7 Answers7

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You can find from here http://cssfontstack.com/ include the different system match.

fen
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    I can't believe Papyrus has a better overall rating than Helvetica... sad – dwkd May 28 '15 at 18:20
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    The site does not include mobile browsers or ChromeBooks or even desktop Linux. – Flimm Mar 29 '18 at 12:48
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    This is a fairly useless site. No way to sort and a number of the fonts listed as "web safe" have a 0% installation rating on Windows or macOS. It’s also plastered in ads. – Zaqx Jun 13 '18 at 21:00
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Just use what you want and gradually fall back to platform defaults and finally generic defaults:

font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Droid Sans', Arial, sans-serif;

If the user's browser doesn't support external fonts, they will have to put up with the browser-chosen default fonts. Those should always be present.

Blender
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http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp

That should cover the basics

Jonathon Ashworth
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  • @A.K, it's sad that when you use Google for searching web resource, w3school is always on the top of the list. – ayjay Jul 29 '14 at 15:59
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    Just because a resource is on w3schools does not *necessarily* mean it is absolute garbage. Like any online resource, use it with a grain of salt. – chowey Feb 18 '15 at 00:57
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    I've found w3school really useful as a beginner. One of the simplest resources for quickly checking up on the basics. – Kitson Apr 08 '15 at 14:37
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...not really.

There are very old web-safe fonts.

Now, there are web-safe font-stacks. Different operating systems and different programs (like Photoshop/InDesign/et cetera) have their own sets of fonts.

So learn to pick similar/appropriate font-stacks, so that Windows 7/8, MacOS X.[whatever] and updated Linux users can have a similar experience, and then have fallback fonts for people on older systems.

Norguard
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I noticed that http://cssfontstack.com/ has a lot of non web safe fonts listed like Copperplate which only come with ms office for example, so beware! I think i'll put up a list at some point for the major OSs windows, apple, android and linux probably ubuntu.

Roy Rogers
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http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/87/knowing_about_web_safe_fonts/ http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp

I guess the above two links will help you.

deadzg_devil
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web-safe fonts have always been a lie with most sites proposing web-safe fonts ignoring anything but current windows and osx (hint: there are lots of other web clients, from android to linux passing through chromebooks…), inventing data about others, or ignoring unicode coverage (so their web-safe fonts only work for English text, sometimes not even including the euro symbol which is quite common nowadays).

The only actual web-safe fonts are the standard aliases such as monospace defined in the css specs.

nim
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