Typography On the Web Gets Different 378
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines."
No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.
IE doesn't support font-face (Score:5, Informative)
I was under the impression that no version of IE supported @font-face?
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/font-face-typekit-and-font-licensing-the-state-of-web-type.ars
To disable @font-face in Firefox 3.5 (Score:5, Informative)
In about:config, set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false and restart the browser.
Re:Oh Lord! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:IE doesn't support font-face (Score:5, Informative)
http://jontangerine.com/log/2008/10/font-face-in-ie-making-web-fonts-work [jontangerine.com]
At least you'll have options (Score:4, Informative)
I still think this can only improve your situation. As you said, you can use your own CSS, or none at all (in FireFox: View > Page Style > No Style). You may be too lazy to change it, but at least you'll have the option.
People already use non-standard fonts on web pages. They just use images or Flash or whatever, which gives the user zero control over appearance.
Additional benefits: since these wacky fonts will be sent as actual text, you'll still be able to Control+F search them, resize them, index them with a search engine, or have them read to you if you're blind.
Re:IE doesn't support font-face (Score:5, Informative)
I managed to get @font-face working for all browser supporting it, buy having both .ttf and .eot files and IE CSS conditional comment. Also, check ttf2eot [google.com] for a tool that run on linux if you don't want to use MS's tool.
Re:Oh Lord! (Score:3, Informative)
Haven't tried it, but I would imagine that about:config -> gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled would probably do the trick.
Just tried it, that works. You need to restart the browser though.
Reality check (Score:2, Informative)
> (...) latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera - recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face
From the linked page viewed in IE7:
> "This demo appears as intended only in Firefox 3.5"
The demo page shows the issue so clearly: You forgot IE. IE8 still doesn't have font-face support for TTF which is possibly the only format people will like to use.
I work with CSS most of my day but I doubt that I will have the pleasure of setting up sites with custom fonts for several years to come with the release cycles and popularity of IE as we have it today. For now we can be happy that IE8 can actually pass the acid2 test.
Regards
Seph
Not on Chromium? (Score:1, Informative)
I couldn't get any font format to work on latest Chromium or Iron. What's the deal with that? Do I need to copy over some DLLs from a Chrome install, as for video?
To convert TTF to that weird Microsoft EOT format, ttf2eot [google.com] works fine and is dead simple to use. What do I use to convert between OTF and TTF? Someone told me to just rename the file as they're very similar, but that didn't work.
Re:IE doesn't support font-face (Score:2, Informative)
Fortunately, there's ttf2eot [google.com]. It's as easy as ttf2eot pinkunicorns.ttf pinkunicorns.eot, and it converts the whole font, not just the codepoints you currently use. Don't include a type attribute in the CSS for IE. What works best is to include the IE stylesheet with a conditional comment so that other browsers won't load it.
Re:typekit (Score:3, Informative)