website/fonts question

[Whiternoise]

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?

[XA04]

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?

[Tarffie]

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

[Nick F]

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

[Tarffie]

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.

[Kezzer]

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.

[tiggerai]

^ wot he said.

[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.

[Funkstar]

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.

[Kezzer]

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

Engrish?

[directhex]

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.

and costs a bomb in added bandwidth

[Kezzer]

and costs a bomb in added bandwidth

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.

[Whiternoise]

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 , i might just put up a link or something for people to download if they can be bothered..

Thanks for the google link 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

[Funkstar]

Engrish?

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.

[Kezzer]

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

[directhex]

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