Is Rockwell a web safe font?

Question

Recently we received a mockup for a website from a client that makes extensive use of the Rockwell font all over the layout for menu items, articles titles, block titles, etc...

I never heard of that font before and I assumed that it wasn't web safe, also I checked online in several places to confirm this, like here and here, but couldn't find any reference to this font.

So after telling to the designers that we are going to need to use some kind of text replacement technique for using this font they told us that this is, indeed, a web safe font and that they checked in Windows and Mac and the font is installed.

So we are going to use this font but I'm still curious if this is a standard font or it's installed with an Adobe product or any other application.

Does anyone have any info on this?

Answer 1

There's a very small set of web-safe fonts; Rockwell isn't one of them because it comes with third-party software like Microsoft Office.

That said, if you must use Rockwell as your primary font, be sure to define a decent font stack for it. That is, use CSS to define a list of fallbacks, where each fallback is a web-safe font:

body, input, textarea {   font-family: Rockwell, "Courier New", Courier, Georgia,                  Times, "Times New Roman", serif; } 

Some information on font stacks:

• http://www.petercolesdc.com/web-fonts-nice-honest/ (includes info on Rockwell)
• http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-stacks/

Nowadays (2011), modern browsers support embedding custom fonts via @font-face. Popular options include Typekit, Google Fonts, and Font Squirrel. Note that not all browsers support loading custom fonts via CSS, so you should still list web-safe fonts as fallbacks.

Answer 2

As an alternative to Rockwell, you can use a font called Arvo from the Google Web Fonts API.