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Is 'Bookman Old Style' web safe? If not, is there something that looks similar which is web safer?

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For the longest time, the list of web safe fonts that I used was this site's, and it doesn't list bookman. But ultimately I'm not sure how accurate it is (hasn't been updated in 3 years), so I don't have a good answer for you. – ColdHawaiian Jun 25 '11 at 10:27
Have you considered using JavaScript deployed fonts such as those from Typekit? – ColdHawaiian Jun 25 '11 at 10:28
No, it is definitely not web safe. You might get broader coverage with Garamond, but it isn't universally available, either. – Cody Gray Jun 25 '11 at 14:11

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 27 '11 at 3:03

5 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

It's not a safe choice: Bookman Old Style is bundled with MS Office. That means it's on a lot of machines, but far from 100% coverage. None of my machines, for example, has it.

I would check out services like FontSquirrel or Google Web Fonts for a free, usable font that can be embedded into your site, and comes close to Bookman.

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up vote 2 down vote

You should re-read the most authoritative page as it includes Bookman..

Other options that usually work cross-platform are:

  • Palatino
  • Garamond
  • Bookman
  • Avant Garde

and a bit down the page continues with

Bookman
Bookman, also called Bookman Old Style. Not shipped with WinXP. Shipped with MS Office 2000.

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1  
Did you forget to link whatever that authoritative page is? – Su' Jun 27 '11 at 8:55
1  
@Su' Original question before being migrated contained a link (named by the OP as the most authoritative page according to google on web fonts..). to web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html and noted that it does not contain the bookman old style.. – Gaby Jun 27 '11 at 19:01
up vote 2 down vote

If you must have Bookman, it's available under Typekit's Personal plan, which is currently just $25/year. Otherwise, there's nothing stopping you from specifying it in your font stacks; you'll have to decide the likelihood of your audience haaving Office installed, etc. and whether that's worth it. Just make sure you provide a fallback to something more reliable like Georgia.

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+1 Here's Bookman on Typekit. – Nick Jun 27 '11 at 9:41
up vote 2 down vote

Bookman Old Style is not a web safe typeface, but you can specify the following CSS font stack to get an 'old style serif' face on many platforms, with plain serif fallbacks:

body{  
    font-family: "Calisto MT", "Bookman Old Style", Bookman, "Goudy Old Style", Garamond, "Hoefler Text", "Bitstream Charter", Georgia, serif;
}
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up vote 0 down vote

It's not:

http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-CombinedResultsFull.shtml

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That's kind of interesting, but for context appears to have a miniscule sample size cf. the "Font survey statistics" heading, nevermind the people taking it are self-selected and the survey is presented on a developer site. That's going to skew things significantly. – Su' Jun 27 '11 at 9:00

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