Is Garamond really a web safe font?

Question

Is Garamond really web safe? Should I go ahead and use it? I know its not there in XP(Georgia is the fallback), however, what about other operating systems? Is it present in ma

Answer 1

For a font to look consistently good across platforms at small sizes it must be hinted well - otherwise it will only look good on those platforms which default to very soft, lightly hinted font smoothing for everything, like Mac - and it'll look terrible on Windows, which will apply strongest hinting and try to make them look really crisp, which really needs the hinting built into the font to be good to work well.

EB Garamond is a free reproduction of Garamond which has an impressive range of glyphs but pays virtually no attention to on-screen rendering - consequently its lack of decent hinting will ensure it looks terrible at small sizes on certain platforms, particularly Windows. While Vista/7/8 improves font rendering somewhat, it only does so in some applications - others, particularly Google Chrome, uses the old font rendering. Edit August 2015 - this is no longer true of Google Chrome.

There are other versions of Garamond out there, probably the best IMHO being Adobe Garamond. Being a commercial font you would need a special license to be allowed to embed it in a web page. Some font foundries sell these, some don't - you just need to read their license :) But if you get that, you may find that they are much better hinted. I can't guarantee it though (but some font stores will allow you to see a preview of a browser-rendered font in certain browsers).

But if you are limiting yourself to free fonts available from Google web fonts, I'd count EB Garamond out for body text, mainly just because of these issues.

Maybe specify "Adobe Garamond" as first, as a few people may have that, but then fall back to fonts like Constantia, then Georgia, then just "serif". Note that Garamond and Constantia have a light stroke and a small x-height so will look a lot more "feint" than something like Georgia.