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Popular fonts with their Mac OSX, Windows and Linux equivalents
Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 under CSS by Dustin Brewer.Knowing the different versions of fonts is important when writing your CSS because you want to ensure that your visitors will be able to not only see the same, or a similar font, but also that they are viewing it correctly on their native OS (operating system). Creating CSS font fall backs is a simple portion of writing CSS but I have noticed that some overlook making sure that they create font fall backs in their stylesheet that incorporate Windows, OSX and Linux. I’m also guilty of this at times.
I’ve created a simple font table that shows OSX, Windows and Linux fonts. Should be a quick and easy way for designers and developers to cross reference the fonts when creating their CSS. These fonts are all popular and web safe fonts.
| OSX | Windows | Linux | Font Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Helvetica | Arial | Arial / Garuda | Sans-Serif |
| Lucida Grande | Lucida Sans Unicode | Garuda | Sans serif |
| Verdana | Verdana | Deja Vu / Bitstream Vera Sans | Sans-serif |
| Geneva | Tahoma | Kalimati | Sans-serif |
| Monaco | Lucida Console | Garuda | Sans-serif |
| Trebuchet MS | Trebuchet MS | Garuda | Sans-serif |
| Charcoal | Impact | Rekha | Sans-Serif |
| Comic Sans MS | Comic Sans MS | TSCu Comic | Cursive |
| Georgia | Georgia | Nimbus Roman No9 L | Serif |
| Courier New | Courier New | FreeMono | monospaced |
| Times New Roman | Times New Roman | Times / FreeSerif | Serif |
For anyone more experienced with Linux definitely feel free to correct me, but in my limited experience these fonts are quite accurate and readily available on popular Linux distros. The Mac and PC fonts are dead on though.
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16 Responses to “Popular fonts with their Mac OSX, Windows and Linux equivalents”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout my web design portfolio.
Great list of fonts, definitely a handy table to have bookmarked for future reference. I also love the new design, been awhile since i been here.
Well, this goes definitely on my wall above the monitor. Also I must say I’m following you shortly but I appreciate your work. Regards from Croatia and stay well.
That is a freaking great list, thanks for putting it together.
All I know is that anyone who forces me to see Comic Sans on their site will be bookmarked right away! Don’t we all love that font?
Monaco ships with Mac OS X, not Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)
Whoops. Got them backwards on the table, thanks for the correction.
This site has a similar list, but goes the extra step of providing images of the actual fonts in action on each platform.
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
your blog app didn’t parse the parentheses correctly above.
anyways, i’m sure your mistake was a typo, anyways; monaco’s a pretty well known and commonly used development font.
wait, did you fix it? oh crap. never mind. i think i’m going back to sleep. lol
Hi,
good list, but I am using Linux (Debian) and have nearly none of the fonts you list installed.
Bitstream Vera is still installed in some distro, but has been superseeded by Deja Vu (Deja Vu Serif, Deja Vu Sans, Deja Vu Sans Mono). Liberation is also quite popular (Liberation Sans, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono). Liberation is similar to Deja Vu, but a little more condensed, expecially the serif one.
Lucida is available for Linux too, but not installed by default on all distro (Lucida Bright is the serif, Lucida Sans the sans-serif, Lucida Sans Typewriter the monospace).
Times New Roman, Courier and Helvetica shouild be available on most distros.
As for Charcoal and Comic Sans, I don’t think there are perfect equivalents.
But any distro can install Windows fonts through a special “installer package”, so any Windows fonts should be available on most distros.
Hope it helps.
Anyone please correct me, as I usually use Debian and Debian-derived distros.
Bye.
Why are the Linux font names all gay and retarded? Christ linux is bullshit.
Linux fonts are still one of my biggest pet peeves. On a nice large LCD screen, they are acceptable in the standard Gnome/KDE gui app.
However, Firefox still doesn’t get it right for a huge amount of pages, and let’s not even talk about OpenOffice. Things are even worse on laptops for some reason.
And yes, I’ve spent many hours trying to tweak my distros using the numerous hacks. Vista fonts are actually pretty nice, and OSX looks great too. It’d be nice if Linux, in 2009, could at least catch up to Windows XP with ClearType circa 2003…
[...] Popular fonts with their Mac OSX, Windows and Linux equivalents … [...]
I noticed that this is not the first time at all that you write about the topic. Why have you decided to write about it again?
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
[...] This list has fairly accurate equivalents across Linux, Mac and Windows based systems. [...]
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You list Garuda as an equialent to the Monaco/Lucida Console families.
This is wrong as Garuda is not a monospace font..