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[Bigwebmaster]

July 29th, 2008, 12:06 pm

Quote:

It’s no secret that fonts on the web suck. The problem is that, in order to use a font on the web, the actual font file must exist on the user’s computer. Given that restriction, and all the variations between operating systems, designers end up with about five or six fonts that are universal enough to use in web design.

It makes for a pretty limited typeface palette. There is, however, a potential solution on the horizon. CSS provides an @font-face declaration which can be used to point to a regular TrueType or OpenType font file that lives somewhere on a web server. Safari supports @font-face, Firefox 3.1 (the alpha of which will be public soon) will as well, and Opera is planning to include it in a future release.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_Futur ... g_Brighter

This was an interesting read. For the most part I have been happy with the limited choices for fonts for regular reading, however, when it comes to titles, headers, etc sometimes it would be nice to have other fonts to make things a bit fancier. Usually to do that I have always done it graphically such as with the Ozzu Logo. However, when it comes to dynamic text such as article titles, thread titles, page titles, etc, I have always stuck with the limited choice of fonts because it would be too much work to always do them graphically -- and then if you ever needed to change a title it would be a pain. On top of all that its not the greatest idea with regards to SEO.

In the future though if all browsers support the @font-face method to dynamically load fonts from the server that could make it much more convenient.

If you read this:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext/

They have come up with an interesting idea to use a PHP script and Javascript to deliver a dynamic PNG image to your browser whenever asked for. This would allow you for instance to write text for all of your headers and titles like you normally do, but your script would automatically use the desired font and convert it to an image for you on the fly. Here is a quote from their page:

Quote:

Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings — short, attention-grabbing blocks of text — it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We’ve become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

[joebert]

July 29th, 2008, 12:34 pm

Internet Explorer better not *#$% this up.

What happens to the fonts once they're sent to the computer, are they permenantly stored there or are they like images and get deleted with the cache ?

How long will it take for premium font makers to cry foul if fonts get saved to the users computer and propagated ?

Will webmasters be required to purchase licenses to use fonts via @font-face since they're essentually distributing the font ?

[righteous_trespasser]

July 29th, 2008, 12:53 pm

joebert wrote:

Internet Explorer better not *#$% this up.

Ditto.

[Bogey]

July 29th, 2008, 7:59 pm

that is awesome! I hope that It would be widely supported... wide enough to be able to use it and know that people would see it

July 29th, 2008, 10:46 pm

This post was helpful, I do hope that people will support this one, its a little eye sore when see our fonts changes when accessing our website when using different computer.

July 30th, 2008, 2:10 am

I think this is an interesting point, and I look forward to the browsers supporting the CSS declaration, however we'll still have the issue of backwards compatability (think of the number of IE6 users that remain).

Bigwebmaster wrote:

If you read this:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext/

They have come up with an interesting idea to use a PHP script and Javascript to deliver a dynamic PNG image to your browser whenever asked for. This would allow you for instance to write text for all of your headers and titles like you normally do, but your script would automatically use the desired font and convert it to an image for you on the fly.

However, this article is 4 years old, and things *have* progressed a little since then. You can use a nifty little thing called sIFR - http://www.novemberborn.net:2543/sifr. This is a flash/JS based unobtrusive, search engine friendly way of producing selectable text in various fonts for header text. You just need to embed the font you want in the flash file (and there are free programs available to do this), and add a simple line or 2 of javascript

[digitalMedia]

July 30th, 2008, 2:51 am

Ah, to dream the impossible dream. It seems like this subject, or something close to it, is a perennial favorite.

[graphixboy]

July 30th, 2008, 5:55 am

I think I remember seeing that Safari 3x supports the @font-face method. http://www.css3.info/webkit-has-web-fonts-support/

Might be worth giving it a try so we can see if this is a worth while solution or if its just going to cause extra head aches. Although I'm with gonzoka, sIFR is a great alternative for most anything other than body copy.

[ATNO/TW]

July 30th, 2008, 6:20 am

One reason I've been fond of Flash is the ability to embed fonts. This is encouraging for standard coded pages though.

July 30th, 2008, 4:27 pm

joebert wrote:

Internet Explorer better not *#$% this up.

Too Late

August 2nd, 2008, 3:11 pm

The biggest winners from this will be the font forges (with the end user coming at a distant second) and the losers like always will be the web developers who will have yet another complication to deal with in their already miserable lives.

[joebert]

August 2nd, 2008, 3:51 pm

Anyone know how big filesize-wise the average TTF or similar font file is ?

For some reason I'm thinking they're a few hundered KB.

[Bigwebmaster]

August 2nd, 2008, 4:09 pm

I would say more around 20-50 KB.

[joebert]

August 2nd, 2008, 4:13 pm

Well that's not so bad. It would be like including a single image that can be displayed an infinate number of ways.

We might have to re-evaluate the worth of a picture, 1000 words might be a little small.

August 5th, 2008, 9:12 am

There's an interesting, and very recent article on this subject at http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/30/custom-web-fonts-pick-your-poison/