Fonts... Why arent more supported?

I must have missed something so please correct me. Why is is that you cant get more than 4-5 fonts for writing on the web?

That's just the way it is right now. Maybe in the future more will be supported across platforms. Maybe not. This is quoted from musik, when he originally posted it in this thread...


So, use the above for your "guide".

Becuase there's only a small set of fonts that are installed as standard on a given windows operating system, as Nunzio pointed out...

You can use ANY font you want. If you've got 500 fonts installed on your system, you can use all 500 fonts in your page, and anybody who has those fonts installed on their system can use them.

You can embed specific fonts into pages though, just hit google and search for WEFT.

Yeah I viewed one website in my lifetime that had the cool designer font "small fonts" and looked cool on my PC – I was shocked they used it cos I bet I would be the only one who could see that font.

The main problem IMO is that if a cool font like Humanist or Cafe type fonts become standard they will no longer be cool

For now there is nothing wrong with Verdana (Tahoma for small bold) as this makes many webpages easy to read.

You could also let the font authotr know you want to use it and have people download it immediatley apon entering your site. Put a splash page up with 2 links.....one says something like "Download XFont and enter the cool site" and the other says "Enter with plain text." Then when the user clicks on the first link they get the start download screen and do all of that and then they can see it.

Just a thought...

Truce - thats unneccessary with an embedded font - the user downloads it automatically, just like a picture embedded in the page.

Plus, many people ignore anything that says download and install from the internet.

So embedding the font doesnt even prompt the user before downloading or installing the font?

...embed the font? So you have to store the font on your webspace and link to it? Fonts are large in file size are they not?

Scroll up, to where I said "just hit google and search for WEFT"

fonts aren't "HUGE"
well
not to download anyway (no idea about embedding)
but to download they are only a few kb

You don't have to install the font just to view it.....
You have to install it to use it in a program like word

think of it like a set of images to download

BTW I just downloaded this font:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/demos/1/PIE0.eot
Which is all of 5kB in size

I found it by following axe's advice

I believe musik is a lady, not a gent :-]


Cheers...


C.C.

Yeah, for a Micro$oft product WEFT is pretty neat. It only officially supports IE (I don't know if other browsers are capable of reading the embeded font file formats - I haven't checked), but when you save it out, it only saves out the characters used in your page (or at least, that's how it is by default)...

This means that each time you edit it, if you use a character you've not used before, you'll have to export the font file out again, but you can set it to add the extra characters if you need it to.

But at leat you can elimiate characters your page may never use... like #, *, %, all the funny accented characters, fractions symbols, etc. So that cuts the file size down a lot in the exported font file.

Isn't it also only supported in IE 5.5+ ?

I don't know, but if anybody's running older than 5.5 they need to upgrade anyways.