1) Web trpography is a bit tricky at times as the computer can only use fonts installed in the users computer due to the traditional HTML browser. So the common fonts we get are;
Arial/ Helvetica and san-serif time/times new Roman, or mono space Courir/ Courier new as the lowest common denminator.
2) Licensing - many font foundries only provide their fonts with strict licensing conditions. You can distribute Flash / PDF files with fonts, because they are encrypted and embedded in the documents. One of the problem with distibuting word or rtf documents, is that you can't legally distribute the fonts as well in many instances.
3) Microsoft and Netscape bickered in the late 90's about font embedding technologies, with not one solution that worked in all platforms - leading to only more mess.
4) Traditionally the web designer did some typography using images of text generated in photoshop - usually for headings. Tedious and inflexible when you wanted to redesign the site.
5)Several options have emerged in recent years:
A. The CSS3 @font-face tag which allows you to specify a URL for a opentype or truetype font. Supported in most resent browsers (Chrome, safari, Forefox, and IE) although they all do it slightly differently. Note there are licensing issues around @font-face fonts.
b. sIFR -has been around for about 4 years, it uses a script to replace heading fonts with flash text. Its legal, has plugins for
wordpress and drupal, but does make pages slightly slower to load. Degrades gracefully and has no licensing issues. http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr
c. CuFon –uses javascript to encode and embed fonts in web pages. Its relatively fast, encoding the fonts is free, and it
degrades gracefully. There are licensing issues.
d. Facelift image
replacement – works on opensource LAMP servers, replaces heading text with images generated dynamically fro fonts.
Fast and reliable – but its no longer text.
e. Typekit– replaces fonts dynamically from a network of servers. It’s a commercial service, with a free version.
How long will it last ?
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