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I've come across a problem where I'd like to use a font style that isn't readily available on most Pc's without downloading from the same site I got it from.

The font fits with the theme I'm going for and in my stubborn, hard headed way, would like to find a way to work around this problem because its perfectly suited to my needs. In teaching myself the basics of HTML and building websites, I've not come across a way where I can (for want of a better word) 'embed' the font so the user visiting the site sees it as its intended rather than have it default back to the default fonts the user has on their computer.

Phew.. confused? me too..

Anyway, am I missing something entirely basic or is there a trick to doing this?

Any help would be most appreciated.

email/msn Syriaeth@hotmail.com

Syriaeth

You have to have the user download the font and have it installed. You could create a Jscript to automatically start the download, but it'd be hard to conditionalize when to pop the menu up. In any case, it's generally not a good idea to force a font download on someone (because they won't do it.) If you must use this font, one thing you could do is to use image files for navigation bar texts, for example, or maybe create the entire site in Flash. In the meanwhile, of course, you could offer the download of that font and then use styles to make that the primary font family, and some normal one (tnr, verdana) the second.

E

Ero pretty much covered everything. Your best bet is to have image links if you really want to use the font. For normal text and content of the website though, trying to use fancy fonts doesn't quite work. They look very choppy, you can't enhance them the way you can a graphic, more importantly they can be very hard to read, and like Ero said, most people wouldn't download them. (I probably wouldn't.)

I'd suggest using Verdana or Arial for normal text, save the fancy stuff for graphics for flash.

Thanks for your help - both of you.

I've previously used the font in some images, I just didnt want to continue this throughout the site for fear of clutter. I was mainly just looking at the font for headings rather than the entire text body which is a tidy little verdana.

I totally agree with not 'forcing' the font download on people - I wouldn't do it and wouldn't expect anyone else to want to download something, especially a file they're unsure of, hence the curiosity about whether I could embed it elsewhere so it still showed.

Knew it was a long shot - guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and find another alternative.

Thanks again for your help and suggestions.

Syriaeth

This discussion reminds me of a chap who made his own system:
made about 60 small transparent gifs - for each letter and puntuation, caps and whatnot, then wrote a program that turned his text into <IMG SRC="blah.gif"> type tags, to on the theory that each pic downloaded once, and used over and over would create faster load times than making full graphics for all the text.. From memory, the extra html overhead made it worse though...