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

No, Garamond is not “web safe” in the sense of being available on all computers. No font is. Garamond has been estimated, in CodeStyle.org surveys, to have about 85% coverage on Windows. It is probably quite rare on other systems.

Using Georgia as fallback for Garamond sounds odd, because they are very different fonts, as you can see by just looking at texts containing them (remember to include digits, they are very different).

Georgia is close to 99% on Windows and Mac but somewhere around 70% on Linux, so it would not be really browser-safe either. The main point however is that it is a font with special characteristics and generally not a good fallback font. Even the generic sans-serif font name is probably a better guess.