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Should I use Tahoma in webdesign? If I couldn't opt for anything different (i.e. because the designer used it in his design), with which fonts could I make an stack of replacement fonts in a CSS stylesheet?
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The ones that are found in both circles are considered to be web safe. If your site uses a font such as Calibri, Mac users may not see it. And if your site uses Futura, Windows users may not see it. Arial will be seen just the way it is by users of both operating systems.
However, some font families are considered "web-safe fonts," (e.g., Arial, Verdana, Helvetica [sans-serif fonts], Georgia, Garamond, [serif fonts], and Courier New [monospace font]) while others are not — and many web-safe fonts are pre-installed on a wide range of computer systems and devices.
Google Fonts aren't inherently supported by your operating system, so by definition, they aren't web safe fonts. Rather, since Google, a third-party, hosts them, a Google Font is called a web font. Confusing, we know, but the difference is that your browser needs to load a file before it can show Google fonts.
Source Sans Pro This is the first open-source font developed by Adobe Systems. Like Roboto, Source Sans Pro was designed specifically for a multi-device world. Not only is it web-safe, it's also sure to render correctly even if a user has custom browser font settings.
Tahoma's fine. Good replacements are Geneva and Verdana, with a generic sans-serif for backup. Better CSS Font Stacks is a great resource for suggesting these kinds of things.
If you're working with a designer who wants to use certain fonts, make sure s/he understands that very few fonts are web-safe sooner rather than later. It'll save you from some headache down the road.
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It depends on what you mean by "safe".
If you mean that a majority of the users have the font, and that you can pick a reasonable alternative for the rest, then it's safe.
If you mean that everyone should be able to view the page exactly as you see it, then it's not safe. Actually no font is safe, except the default fonts in CSS. That's why you should always provide alternative fonts as backup, and always provide a default font as the last resort. Example:
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; Note that even if the user has the Tahoma font, it will not always render exactly the same. The user can have different settings for font smoothing, which greatly affects how the font is rendered. There may also be slight differences in kerning and hinting for different versions of the same font.
If you need some text to look exactly the same all the time, the only option is to make an image out of it.
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