Breaking out of Verdana/Georgia

[greiggy]

Every so often one sees really nice typography on a site. I believe there's a way of embedding fonts to break out of the straitjacket of 4 or 5 that are common between Mac and Wintel. How do you do it?

[quiksan]

something like this in a css file should do the trick:

@font-face {
        font-family: "Gadget";
        src: url("http://cruisinkidspages.com/Gadget")
      }

that's only a theory, as I haven't gotten it to work. it requires that you use a specific format of font file...TT maybe? anyway, if you figure it out, let us know

[mdnky]

There's no real good cross-browser/platform solution right now. Here's a link to a way to do it, but chances are only IE will work properly with it on a win platform.

http://www.ssi-developer.net/design/embed-font.shtml

[sonjay]

Fonts and typography are the holy grail of web site development. Nope, there's no cross-platform/cross-browser solution available.

Much as it pains me to admit that M$ did something good, they did something really excellent in commissioning Verdana and Georgia to be legible and readable on a screen display. You can compare Verdana and Georgia side by side with other common serif and sans serif fonts -- Helvetica, Arial, Futura, Times, Palatino, Garamond, etc. -- and Verdana and Georgia are simply so much more readable on screen than the others. Because they were designed to be.

I really wish that someone would design some new fonts specifically for screen display, the way Microsoft did with Verdana and Georgia, and that the browsers (all of them) would package those fonts to be installed as part of the browser installation. They could be embedded in the browser app, perhaps, so that you're not rudely installing fonts on people's systems, but they'd be available to the browser itself. Then you'd know that anyone browsing your page had those fonts, and you'd actually have a choice of decent fonts to use.

[greiggy]

I agree about Verdana and Georgia. And we need some more commissioned! (Whtever happened to Minion?)

So, Sonjay, howdya get Tropical Web Works looking so good then?

[sonjay]

Originally Posted by greiggy

I agree about Verdana and Georgia. And we need some more commissioned! (Whtever happened to Minion?)

So, Sonjay, howdya get Tropical Web Works looking so good then?

Minion -- whatever did happen to Minion? I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was dropped. The only place Minion exists on my computer is in my Adobe fonts folder -- so I guess Adobe still likes it.

TWW -- clean, simple design, generous margins, generous line-height. And of course, I'm assuming you're on a Mac, since this is a Mac site. Everything looks better on Macs. Gad, I can load up any Web site on my Mac and my PC, sitting side by side, and absolutely everything looks better on the Mac -- the type, the graphics, the widgets (buttons, form elements, etc.), everything. It's kind of sad to realize that for 90% of the surfing world, the Web is so much uglier than what I see.

[Harvestr]

Typography is an area Flash excels in since you can use any font you want. I know you wouldn't go to Flash for this reason only, but just thought I'd add that.

[TommyWillB]

Originally Posted by Harvestr

Typography is an area Flash excels in since you can use any font you want. I know you wouldn't go to Flash for this reason only, but just thought I'd add that.

In multiple cases I've found myself making GIF images for page titles, simply so I could have nice fonts.

I had a demo copy of Flash and I tried to make a generic embedded Flash movie that took in the parameters 1) a string to be displayed, 2) a font name, and 3) forground/background colors. From that my hope was to use this as a small embedded fash move instead of the GIF. With passable parameters, it would be generic and reusable.

I didn't really know what I was doing, so I did not finish it before my demo copy timed out. I could not figure out how to pass in parameters, etc.

But I always thought that it would be cool to use small flash movies embeded within otherwise normal HTML pages. I rather dislike the entire page being flash, because it just does not feel "web-like" to me. I thought this would be a neat happy medium where you could use HTML and Flash each for what they excelled at without being exclusive to one or the other.



I've also considered a PHP solution where PHP dynamically generates the GIF/PNG image, but the Apple PHP installation does not seem to have the PHP GD image manipulation features compiled in...