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Are Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial safe in multilanguage web?

Could somebody tell me if fonts TNR, Helvetica, Arial are safe in multilanguage website?

This website will be among others in English, Polish (polish diacritical signs), Greek (greek alphabet) and Russian (cyrillic). Will it be safe I just use for example:

font-family: Times New Roman, serif;

Should I bother about "special" Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial for greek and russian?

Solution

  • Times New Roman, Arial and Helvetica are featured within the CSS2.1 specification and so can be considered safe to use. The serif at the end of your font-family declaration is the generic family and acts as a fall back. If the browser cannot render the specified font, it will fall back to a serif font.

    As for whether they support Greek and Russian symbols: that's a different matter. You'll have to check this yourself (through sites like fileformat) to ensure they include the specific Unicode range.