Font is a four letter word it seems...

Idiot needs 101 chat on font usage

[Dumb_guy]

Trying to use customs fonts on my web page text. Being an idiot, I thought simply loading the font file to the server would do the trick.

Seems I am wrong. Can anyone help?

[SmallTime]

Most fonts are owned by someone, and licensed in their use, put them on a server and anyone can grab them. So while their are a couple seldom used schemes for font embedding that protects the font, for practical purposes I stick to fonts available on most users systems, and use fancier fonts only in graphics. [webmasterworld.com...] discusses it, or use the site search above for more info. There are no dumb questions, although dumb answers have been known to exist. :)

[Woz]

Hey Dumb_guy, you can't be that dumb 'cos you found this place, right!?

Anyway, browsers actually use the fonts that are installed on the visitors computer so uploading to your server will not help at all. There was a move by MS to embed additional fonts into the html but it hasn't really taken off as it increases the page size dramatically.

So it is best to keep to the default set of fonts found on most people computers. There is a long standing discusion here about default fonts [webmasterworld.com] which pretty well sums up the situation and also points to some other threads.

Onya
Woz

[caine]

Agreeing with SmallTime and Woz, stay with the generic fonts.

However, keep on experimenting with the various fonts you do have, and font decoration and color, and i think you will be surprised what you'll end up with.

[Marcia]

Special fonts can work very well with small size graphics like headings, if they're in few colors and converted to gif format with the number of colors reduced way down. It adds a nice touch with very small file size if it's coordinated with ordinary page text font.

[papabaer]

Since excellent advice has already been offered, I'd like to add some more encouragement. Consider the advice given, read the more in the links provided and then step back for a bit and give it some thought. There is really a wide variety of fonts you CAN use... and creating graphics for special use is certainly available to you. Finally, with all the styling options available, combined with the above, you should be able to find a solution that is more than satisfactory. :)

Best of luck!
papabaer