Utilising a non-system font on a website

[glitch]

Let's assume I wanted to use a non-standard, non-system font on a website. In other words, a font that I liked the look of but that wouldn't necessarily be installed on my visitors computers. And let's assume that was Helvetica, as it's a nice font.

What are my options for being able to do so?

 

[bads]

Hi Glitch, I think your best bet might be to put the font on a memorystick and then drop it into the fonts section in control panel on whatever computer your on....

 

[welly]

Bads,

I'm not sure how feasible it is for glitch to go round all the computers hooked up to the Internet around the world installing fonts.

Glitch,

Your options are to use flash, use an image or if you dare, look up sifr on google.

 

[welly]

Oh and arial is 95.724% identical to helvetica

 

[glitch]

Hi Glitch, I think your best bet might be to put the font on a memorystick and then drop it into the fonts section in control panel on whatever computer your on....

I've either confused you or you've missed the point, bads, so I'll clarify.

I have a website. But I'd really like to be able to use a non-standard font in its design. If, for example, I designed it using Helvetica and my visitors didn't have that font installed on their computer, providing I'd coded the site properly and included system fonts alongside Helvetica in the font-family, nobody would be any the wiser.

But I'd like to be able for everyone who views the site to see all the text as I intended it.

 

[glitch]

Your options are to use flash, use an image...

Could I use flash sparingly? I.e. just dotted around the place?

And with the images, what would be an easy way to turn a word into a hyperlink? Just have that single word cut out of the image and hyperlinked?

...or if you dare, look up sifr on google.

Now that's quite interesting.

Oh and arial is 95.724% identical to helvetica

Is that official?

Do you have a link to your source? Out of sheer curiosity I'd like to see what percent Verdana and Tahoma are rated as.

 

[KayJay]

sifr.

If you really must. Works a treat though. And if flash is disabled your fallback font will be shown instead in html.

You could use images instead, but sifr is a good alternative.

 

[bads]

Yep i had missed the point. Although travelling all over the world as a font installer could be interesting

 

[Richard King]

sifr is fine if it isnt much text - also Google: WEFT

Consider the copyright of the font

 

[Slapo]

As mentioned, sIFR or typeface could do the trick.
However, if possible, use more standard fonts (Arial, Helvetica or a generic font family, such as sans-serif).

 

[Jamesbuk]

Or you could make the writing into an image...

So open photoshop or whatever, write what you want and formatted how you like and then save it as a jpg. Ive done it plenty of times and it works fine.

Regards, James

 

[KayJay]

Or you could make the writing into an image...

So open photoshop or whatever, write what you want and formatted how you like and then save it as a jpg. Ive done it plenty of times and it works fine.

Regards, James

Problem with that is it's not accessible, not be search engines or screen readers. sifr is the way to go.

edit: actually that's not correct. You could assign an image to the CSS style and set the text margin style to -3000, that will hide the text off the screen but show the image in it's place, the text will be readable by search engines and screen readers. It's hacky but works.

 

[Ste L]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/107936/how-to-add-some-non-standard-font-to-website

 

[KayJay]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/107936/how-to-add-some-non-standard-font-to-website

That's a pretty nasty way to do it.

 

[glitch]

sifr.

If you really must. Works a treat though. And if flash is disabled your fallback font will be shown instead in html.

If flash is disabled they wouldn't be able to see the important parts of the site, so I think sIFR might be perfect.

Images are another option though. Especially given the site's design.

Or you could make the writing into an image...

Problem with that is it's not accessible, not be search engines or screen readers. sifr is the way to go.

I'm not that bothered about accessibility.

The people visiting the site will be more likely to type the URL in directly that find it via Google. I'll worry about search engine rankings when I need to.

 

[KayJay]

Go with SIFR then. We've already recommended it

I added those points as general observations, not necessarily for you, but for others who may be looking to do the same thing.