css and fonts

[ipecac]

Is it realistic to ever hope for a font implementation in CSS (and/or browsers) that make it possible to use fonts within style sheets that are not installed by the user viewing the output of the CSS? Sometimes I like to use a different font than the standard web fonts (Gill Sans MT in for instance, but this is not a standard font, so only a select few will actually see and experience it).

I looked into WEFT a while back, but it didn't behave very nice with regards to browsers other than IE, so I discarded this as an option to implement other fonts in my layouts.

This is a feature I'm dying to see become reality. The ability to assign whatever font you want to your style sheet and have it rendered regardless of the user actually having the font installed.

Any thoughts on this?

(Sorry if my english is a bit rusty.. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this) :)

[JAB Creations]

IE technically can do this but there have been securirty conecerns.

The proper thing to do is to first specify the font you'd like to use and then specify a standard font. Standard fonts are Arial, Times Roman Numeral, and Verdana.

[ipecac]

Well, yes obviously. When I specify for instance Gill Sans MT, this is how I do it:

BODY {
font-family: "Gill Sans MT", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

I know you're not missing my main point, but only users who have the Gill font installed will actually see it and that's what I want to see change. What I'm hoping for is that there somehow will be possible for users to see Gill Sans MT eventhough they don't have that particular font file installed on their system, perhaps by uploading the font-file to the server (much like WEFT) and have the server harness the information in the font file and output it whenever a user doesn't have the specified font installed.

Or is it already possible to do so? (not by WEFT!)

[bill]

You can't do that with CSS today.

If you want to force a font you would limited to graphic files instead of text in a cross-browser environment. Back before Windows was as capable as it is today with multilingual environments I used to use a site that employed a system along those lines. The site would scan a Japanese page and then return each single character as a GIF file. With a system like this you could certainly display any font you want, but the page rendering time is a bit of a concern.

Just think of the security implications if websites could force downloads of fonts just by opening the page...like IE is capable of with ActiveX.

[Robin_reala]

You could look into Mike Davidson's SIFR project.

[ipecac]

Bill:

Right, but is it realistic to hope for some sort of technology that can make it possible?

And regarding the aforementioned security implications: I wasn't thinking along the lines of forcing the webpage to download a font file onto the users computer, but more alonge the lines of a technology (a server/client-side combo), to somehow "extract" the information from the server-side font file and output the proper font on the client-side. Does this sound realistic or am I shooting in the dark no matter how you look at it? (hope I'm not..)

Maybe I'm grasping for too much with this, but it'd sure be nice :)

Anyway, I think this is an interesting topic.

And Robin_reala: Thanks for the tip. Will look into that.