Georgia
Serif · shipped with Windows and macOS · rendering from your machine
Waterfall
Character set
Text, 14 / 17 / 20 px
The brief was unusual and the constraint was absolute: the face had to survive being drawn with whole pixels on a display that offered about ninety of them to the inch. Anything that depended on a hairline, a fine bracket, or a delicate join would disintegrate. So none of those things were used.
The brief was unusual and the constraint was absolute: the face had to survive being drawn with whole pixels on a display that offered about ninety of them to the inch. Anything that depended on a hairline, a fine bracket, or a delicate join would disintegrate. So none of those things were used.
The brief was unusual and the constraint was absolute: the face had to survive being drawn with whole pixels on a display that offered about ninety of them to the inch. Anything that depended on a hairline, a fine bracket, or a delicate join would disintegrate. So none of those things were used.
Notes
Georgia was designed for a screen that no longer exists, and the compromises it made for that screen turn out to be the reasons it still reads well. The x-height is large relative to the cap height, so it holds its shape when the renderer has few pixels to work with. The strokes are heavy enough that anti-aliasing does not thin them into grey. The counters are open, which is why it survives being set at 14 pixels in a sidebar where a book face would close up and turn into texture.
The famous quirk is the numerals: they are old-style, sitting on the baseline at x-height with ascenders and descenders, rather than lining up like fenceposts. In running prose this is correct and pleasant — a year set in Georgia does not shout. In a table of figures it is a problem, because the digits no longer align optically and columns look ragged. If a page has both, the usual answer is to set tabular data in something else rather than to abandon the face.
It is wide. Noticeably wider than Times at the same nominal size, which means a column measured for Times will hold fewer words in Georgia and may need either a wider column or a size down. This is the single most common way people get Georgia wrong: they swap the font-family and leave the measure alone, and then conclude the face is clumsy when what they have actually built is a column that fits about forty characters.
Practical
| Classification | Transitional serif, screen-optimised |
|---|---|
| Designer | Matthew Carter, hinting by Tom Rickner, 1993–96 |
| Availability | Ships with Windows and macOS; not present on most Linux distributions or on Android |
| Numerals | Old-style by default, no lining alternates in the shipped version |
| Weights | Regular and bold only; italic for both. No light, no semibold |
| Comfortable at | 15–20px for body text. Holds together down to 12px, which is unusual |
| Watch for | Wide set width — budget roughly 10% more horizontal room than Times |
Stack used on this page
font-family: Georgia, "Iowan Old Style", "Times New Roman", serif;
The fallbacks are ordered by how little they will disturb the layout rather
than by how much they resemble Georgia. Iowan Old Style is present on Apple
devices and is close in colour and width; Times New Roman is narrower and will
reflow, but it is on essentially everything. Ending at the generic
serif keyword rather than at a named face matters on Linux, where the
first two are usually absent and the generic resolves to whatever the
distribution has configured — typically a Liberation or DejaVu serif.