They way I believe how fonts work, is that there are only a small limited amount of fonts available cross all browsers.
And if we want a font that is not supported we have to turn that button/link or whatever it may be into an image.
Is there anything out that allows us to use non-traditional font without having to turn them into images?
I thought I read something one time about an online font library you could use with your web sites?
It seems to me you could link to an extensive online font library resource (much like you do to a jquery library) and virtually pull up any font you want across all browsers? Is there anything like this?
You want to look into @font-face (google it and you’ll get a billion good things).
The thing to be careful with: font files can be large. When you use @font, the whole font has to be loaded, not just the characters you use. This means adding even one special font to your page can cause it to take a much longer time to load.
Another question to consider is … does it actually matter if people don’t all see your site in the same font? You might want to go for a consistent approach to headings (whether it’s web safe or downloaded/embedded/linked fonts) if they are key to your branding, but beyond that, there’s nothing wrong with setting fonts that people might or might not have, eg
body {font-family:'franklin gothic book', calibri, arial, sans-serif;}
I don’t want to go down to the lowest common denominator, I want people to use my preferred fonts where they can, but at the same time I’m not going to add massive download overhead for something as trivial as body text. And guess what … in twelve years, I’ve never had anyone complain that they see the site in a different font.
Where I work, our designer is a big fan of Myriad Pro, so that’s at the beginning of all of our sites. But it’s not that unique (or big of a deal if everyone doesn’t see it), so I always add Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif to the stack for those that don’t have it. It still looks good either way.
And Ralph, that’s a pretty epic list. I’m going to keep that handy for myself. =p
Yes, Myriad Pro is much nicer than Arial et al., but most people don’t have it on their computer so won’t see it. Haven’t checked if it’s available as a web font, though. That does change things a lot.
As for the list, I tend to record anything I find, and then end up with big lists like that.
