website/fonts question

What's the easiest way to display fonts that the user doesn't have installed on their pc (or as the web designer, you're assuming that they don't have the font you want to put on the website)?

Ie. i have a rather nice font that called Requiem, but it's a freeware thing and i doubt that many people have it installed. Will they be able to see it properly, or will the browser just default it back to Times New Roman or Arial? (CSS sort of thing).

Is there a freeware script or something that will display fonts that are not installed?

Only way I know of doing it would be to do it as an image instead.

I'm not sure if it would change the font automatically.. It will probably just change it to whatever the browser uses as the default font. If not it will come up as question marks or squares. Test it out maybe? :)

You can embed them. Not sure what the method is since I've always stuck to the standard fonts for text so have a Google search link http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=web+font+embedding

I always thought that if you use a font that a user doesn't have installed it reverts to the basic system font?

Looking at the search results I'm not sure if it still works tbh, a lot of that information is from the early 2000s and a few mention Windows 95/98.

No, in your CSS definition you can decide which font to use, and it will revert to another font. For example

body
{
font: 1.0em "YourFont", "Arial", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Times New Roman";
}

This way, it'll check for "YourFont", if it's not there it will go to "Arial" and if that's not there (some unix systems perhaps) it will go to "Lucida Sans Unicode" and so forth.

^ wot he said.

As for having a custom font on your website, yes, it is possible. There are a few websites around which dynamically produce images of each individual character in that character set. Of course it requires some clever coding to convert characters into images, and you need each font to be stored as some sort of resizable image (best bet would be SVG if the client supports it).

So in short, yes it is doable across all systems.

did web fonts stored on the server and downloaded when needed not take off then?

I remember this appeared at the tail end of when i was doing web design, never needed to use it though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

did web fonts stored on the server and downloaded when needed not take off then?

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Engrish?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kezzer

As for having a custom font on your website, yes, it is possible. There are a few websites around which dynamically produce images of each individual character in that character set. Of course it requires some clever coding to convert characters into images, and you need each font to be stored as some sort of resizable image (best bet would be SVG if the client supports it).

So in short, yes it is doable across all systems.

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and costs a bomb in added bandwidth ;)

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Originally Posted by directhex

and costs a bomb in added bandwidth ;)

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Yeh but remember it's going to be the same image used throughout the entire alphabet, and if a letter is only around 10 colours then that's a tiny download. The additional bandwidth wouldn't actually be a great deal considering file sizes. However, it would require an additional amount of execution on the server-side, but this is where page caching is handy, because then you'd just have a saved page with image tags embedded. It introduces a heck of a lot of complexity to a seemingly simple output.

Yeah, at the moment i'm just using the CSS "priority" method, which works fine - just means it looks much better on my own pc :P, i might just put up a link or something for people to download if they can be bothered..

Thanks for the google link :P it's another of those annoying "yes i have searched for it" but unless you know exactly what you want to do in their terms it's impossible to find anything :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kezzer

Engrish?

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Sorry :)

There is/was a way to have specific fonts sitting on your server and referenced through CSS. I think they were a particular type of font file that was a lot smaller than a regular TTF file. Coud have just been compressed, not sure.

This might have been IE only, but I'm pretty sure it was submitted as a standard to the relevant bodies.

There is of course license issues in distributing fonts, also you would need to either locate or produce the fints in this new format.

PHP could probably pull fonts out of a font file and render them as a graphic as opposed to true-type fonts.

if your site doesn't work with the styles turn off, then it's broken

exact fonts should be the LAST thing you worry about

is your site accessible? does it work with screen-readers, colorblind users, and so on?

if not, go back to the drawing board

fonts as images? badness

no no no don't do it.

Using custom fonts on a website is just asking for trouble - I've had exactly the same problem before and ended up doing the sensible thing and used standard fonts for any text, and images for the few places where the font was really needed.

You *can* technically embed fonts but this will force every single user to download and install that font before they can view your page. This will:
a) drive up your bandwidth costs massivly so
b) piss off every single user to your site who doesn't have the font
c) slow down your website (if there are lots of users without the font)
d) be a really, really, really bad idea.

Just use standard web fonts and images for the rest (but only if you really have to)...its a much better idea :)

Drive up bandwidth costs massively? Are fonts really that big? (answer: no) ;)

Slow down your website? Answer, no. Unless you're getting a hundred users per minute then it's not going to affect the bandwidth that much to be honest seeing as though the images/font will be tiny (less than 1KB most probably for each font image if embedded, put them altogether and you've got about 20KB)

I don't agree with non-standard fonts, but you need to clearly justify the reason against it. Websites shouldn't have any pre-reqs mainly for compliance and compatibility. That's why flash sites suck, there's an amazing amount of users who just don't have flash installed (myself included).

I totally disagree there Kezzer - it will increase bandwidth costs and while this depends on the traffic it is still something to consider.

Page execution time is also important - when developing a web site, be it simple HTML or a full blown web app if you don't care about every millisecond of execution time and every single byte that is sent too and from your webserver then you are doing something wrong. Every millisecond counts as each one that you can save means that more users can access your site faster and at the same time. This is a bonus for you (more hits per second = more money from ads, or just more page views) and for the user - as the page will load faster for them and not install some rubbish that they don't want (eg, a font).

Accessibility is also another HUGE area, which is largely an issue for corporate/business sites where you simply *have* to be fully compatable with screen readers and the like..its not an option anymore and website have been successfully sued (grant in the USA) over this.

Then of course there is basic compatability - your site should be fully usable in every single standards compliant browser for the language version you are using. So if you are writing in XHTML then all XHTML 1.0 compliant browsers should be able to view it in the same way. If you start embedding fonts you risk problems here.

Its bad web-design, just like using <ALLUPPERCASETAGS> and doing things like <br> (not closing tags).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

I totally disagree there Kezzer - it will increase bandwidth costs and while this depends on the traffic it is still something to consider.

Page execution time is also important - when developing a web site, be it simple HTML or a full blown web app if you don't care about every millisecond of execution time and every single byte that is sent too and from your webserver then you are doing something wrong. Every millisecond counts as each one that you can save means that more users can access your site faster and at the same time. This is a bonus for you (more hits per second = more money from ads, or just more page views) and for the user - as the page will load faster for them and not install some rubbish that they don't want (eg, a font).

Accessibility is also another HUGE area, which is largely an issue for corporate/business sites where you simply *have* to be fully compatable with screen readers and the like..its not an option anymore and website have been successfully sued (grant in the USA) over this.

Then of course there is basic compatability - your site should be fully usable in every single standards compliant browser for the language version you are using. So if you are writing in XHTML then all XHTML 1.0 compliant browsers should be able to view it in the same way. If you start embedding fonts you risk problems here.

Its bad web-design, just like using <ALLUPPERCASETAGS> and doing things like <br> (not closing tags).

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Which is exactly why I said page caching is probably a good thing to do in this case (mentioned in previous post)

Also, could you re-read my post please? Because you obviously didn't as you've just said "I totally disagree with you, embedding fonts is a bad thing because of compliance and compatibility" yet that's exactly what I said in my previous post. How contradictory :p Hell, I'll even quote it just to be clear for you

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kezzer

I don't agree with non-standard fonts, but you need to clearly justify the reason against it. Websites shouldn't have any pre-reqs mainly for compliance and compatibility. That's why flash sites suck, there's an amazing amount of users who just don't have flash installed (myself included).

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I was referring to your first two points, should have made that clearer :)

Page caching helps yes, but its not a solution to the problem, and people will still have to download your font or your images...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kezzer

Drive up bandwidth costs massively? Are fonts really that big? (answer: no) ;)

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an old version of Times New Roman (from win9x, without enhanced characters) is 323k. that's a large requirement for every visitor, especially those on dial-up

Righty then.. Arial it is :(

To be perfectly honest.. the only people who'll be using my website are people i know and maybe someone who has done a really obscure google search - and as none of them are either colourblind, have dial up, etc. then it doesn't really bother me. The most i'm going to do in that respect is make sure it's XHTML strict/CSS compliant and leave it at that.