Question re: editing html code

edchalk

Hi,

I was hoping that a techie could provide some guidance on the following problem:

I have a website for which I would like to include a rarely-used custom font in the body of the page. I've downloaded the font in question "Trashed"to my laptop and it's now accessible on my version of microsoft word. I would now like to use this font on my webpage - does anybody know if this is possible ? and if so - could somebody point me towards a cut&paste style editing job that will make it happen (i'm not fantastic with html yet)

Many thanks in advance for any help

Kind regards

Ed

weegie.geek

You can't *REALLY* use it for the text on your website, but you can use it in an image you'll then display on the page.

I say you can't really, because while you CAN specify a font name for text to use, if they don't have it installed, it won't work, and who's going to download a font just to read a website?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_family_%28HTML%29

swvillafan

weegie.geek wrote: »

You can't *REALLY* use it for the text on your website, but you can use it in an image you'll then display on the page.

I say you can't really, because while you CAN specify a font name for text to use, if they don't have it installed, it won't work, and who's going to download a font just to read a website?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_family_%28HTML%29

weegie is right, unless the viewer has that font on their machine (unlikely if its custom) then it will default to Arial I believe.

There is a possible way around it using a combination of php and javascript but if you are still learning html then it might not be suitable. Here is a link to the article if you want to take a look anyway!

weegie.geek

Good thinking. Assuming your webhost has GD installed, that's a possible solution, but generally you'd want to pre-render these things, it'd put quite a lot of strain on a shared webhost to dynamically generate the text for an entire website as images, on the fly like that. It'd churn through your transfer allowance too, comparatively. For things like headers etc it'd be usable though.

DVardysShadow

edchalk wrote: »

Hi,

I was hoping that a techie could provide some guidance on the following problem:

I have a website for which I would like to include a rarely-used custom font in the body of the page. I've downloaded the font in question "Trashed"to my laptop and it's now accessible on my version of microsoft word. I would now like to use this font on my webpage - does anybody know if this is possible ? and if so - could somebody point me towards a cut&paste style editing job that will make it happen (i'm not fantastic with html yet)

Many thanks in advance for any help

Kind regards

Ed

For reasons already explained, it will cost you to use this font directly in the body. Your next problem is that if you pre-render the images, it may look fine on your browser with your choice of font rendering size and your resolution - but anyone with a largescreen will probbaly find that your prerendered text image is too small - far too small. The beauty of HTML is that your users computers render the text to suit your users preferences and now you want to do away with that.

People will probably hate the readability of your site. Do yourself and your users a favour and stick with the standards.

tronator

weegie.geek wrote: »

You can't *REALLY* use it for the text on your website, but you can use it in an image you'll then display on the page.

But you don't really want to do this if you want to be found in search engines. Search bots can't read text in images.

weegie.geek

Very true. The time will come when Google starts to OCR images I'm sure, but it wouldn't do the site any good in search engine rankings right now, assuming that matters to the OP.

Owain_Moneysaver

You can embed the font in the webpage, so that the browser may download it and use it to display the text. However this will depend on the browser and the user's preferences, so don't rely on it.

How to embed fonts:
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol3/css_no15.htm (rather out of date, refers to IE4!!!)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533034(VS.85).aspx

Note that fonts are copyright and you may need licencing to changed them to embedded font file format and incorporate them in webpages.

Using images instead of text is clunky and potentially illegal under the Disability Discrimination Act.