Using non-standard fonts

One of the minor drawbacks of FrontPage is that it allows you to select any font, that is registered on your PC, to design your web pages. I say this is a drawback because many web designers aren't aware that you can't use any font you'd like and have your site appear the way you designed it on all PCs.

Why? Because when a browser renders a web site it can only use fonts that are installed on that PC. So if you used a non-standard font on your page (ex: Garamond Extra Bold), and the font you specify is unavailable, the text will appear in the default font which is set by the user's browser.

There are only a few fonts that you can rely on the majority of people having installed on their PCs. Times New Roman, Arial and Courier are on most computers though some Macs will not have them. Other commonly available ones are Verdana and Tahoma.

Tip: When specifying a font you can select more than one so that you can control what the browser chooses. For example, you could use <FONT FACE = "Verdana, Arial, Times"> and the browser will render the first font in your list that's available on the user's PC before it chooses their default font.

So what if you really want to use a particular font?  There a a few things you can do.  One way is to make the text into an image.  The downside of this is that images can slow the loading of your site.  Another way is to "embed" the font into your page.

To embed fonts in your page you can download the Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT), which lets you create "font objects" that are linked to your Web pages.

You can read more about fonts and typography on Microsoft's web site.

9:53:32 AM  .