Identifying Installed Fonts

A nifty script - I didn't know this was possible

[tedster]

There's lots of clever stuff on the web, but this article on Webreference really took me by surprise. I've been playing around with it and it looks like a lot of fun -- and it offers some potential bandwidth savings as well.

Identifying Installed Fonts [webreference.com]

The script would be particularly useful in a web application or Intranet where you could control what user agents and O/S are involved. But I must admit, my inner geek is very happy with this toy and I'm likely to experiment on a general traffic web page anyway.

[tedster]

I've done a few tests using Webdings fonts, as the article suggests. Pretty nifty. You can get a large "image" with no image download at all -- and Webdings are very widely available.

[BlobFisk]

This is certainly a useful script - but I noticed that Opera 7.11 didn't display the Webding font on page 3. Is there a browser support issue with this?

[tedster]

Yes, I ran into the same thing. I haven't pinned it down yet -- this is more like playtime than work -- but for now I'm considering it to be IE only until I can prove otherwise. When I used the tests on the page in Opera it told me I didn't have Arial installed!

As they mention in the article, there are TWO issues involved:

1) Is the font installed
2) Can the browser display that font

It's question two where the fuzz comes in for me. I know that browsers download with their own "native" versions of fonts. 12px Arial is a different size in different browsers, not because they count pixels differently but because they actually use different fonts that are similarly named. And all browsers cannot display all types of fonts, even if they are installed.

I've been very unadventurous with fonts and font-families so the information never caught my attention until recently. Something new to learn about.