8 replies to this topic

[Cyrus]

For the title section of [my site][URL unnecessary] I have used text instead of images. The font I used is “Bradley Hand ITC” (24pt). On my browser the font and everything else shows up correctly, but on my other computer the Bradley font doesn’t show up. Also, a friend told me that on his computer the font is incorrect, and part of the title text carries on to a second line rather than being on one line.

Is there a way I can have the correct font show up on all computers without using an image file?

Also, what is the best way to test my site on different browsers?

Edited by Jill, 31 October 2003 - 08:20 PM.

[qwerty]

Cyrus, the font is only going to show up if the user happens to have it installed on their machine. Short of using images instead of text (which I don't recommend), there's not much you can do about that.

Your best bet is to use your style sheet to set a list of potential fonts for that tag. Something like
h1 {font-family: "Bradley Hand ITC", "Tempus Sans ITC", "Eras Light ITC", Comic Sans, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

That way, if the browser can't find the first font in the list, it will try the next. If it gets all the way to the end of the list and can't find anything, it will use its standard sans-serif font, whatever that would be.

[Cyrus]

Thanks for the info qwerty. That helps out alot.

[OldWelshGuy]

Cyrus there is a site that simulates different browsers and also screen resolutions, i cant remember the addy now, but i will dig it out for you tomorrow (providing no-one beats me to it) it is 1.20 am here now so i am off to bed.

How are you building the site BTW, the reason i ask is that you have to be carful with editors like dreamweaver and Front page, as they will use a default font for the body text if you are not controlling it or specifying it. This could result in it displaying times new roman on some machines, and verdana on others depending on browsers configuration etc, so it is always best to name the font and try to stick to the 'dead certs' like arial, TNR, verdana, and to use font families if you are moving to specialist fonts that are not popular.

[Cyrus]

Thanks for the help OldWelshGuy. I’m using Frontpage, and specifying the font, but not yet familiar with using the style sheet and font hierarchy. I don’t know the first thing about HTML except for cutting and pasting some code here and there.

[qwerty]

If you don't know how to write a style sheet (I'm not very good at it myself -- had to get some help from a fellow forum member earlier today) you can get FP to create it for you.

Bring up the new page dialog, choose the style sheets tab and double click normal style sheet. That will put you in a blank page with a little floating "style" box. If you click the bottom half of it, a dialog will come up that will allow you to select the various attributes for all your tags.

After that, all you have to do is associate your pages with the style sheet and remove any formatting that's already in the page's HTML. And here's how you do that (from FP's help file):

In Page view, select the page to which you want to assign an external cascading style sheet (CSS).
On the Format menu, click Style Sheet Links.
To find your external CSS, click Add (if it is not already in the URL list).
In the Select Style Sheet dialog box, click the CSS you want to add, and then click OK.
In the URL list, select the CSS you want to assign to the page.

[Randy]

Another way to do it would be to Embed the non-standard font via CSS, though frankly I wouldn't advise it for most sites, especially e-commerce sites. There are some issues which may rear up to bite you.

In case you do want to use the Embedding method though, NetMechanic has a little tutorial up explaining how to do it.

[McFox]

You can download a little gizmo from Microsoft that does the font embedding for you. Although I have it, I haven't used it yet.

Have a search through MS for "WEFTIII2b1.exe"

McFox

[OldWelshGuy]

Re embedding fonts, I looked at this a little while back, and there seemed that there could be a problem with the embedded fonts not showing correctly if the viewer has altered font size in their browser settings, plus it will only work with IE there was a lot of negative replies to these questions and i decided to let it be for the time being, as i would rather have a slightly boring font than (*&(&^%$^^ displaying .

here are some links that might help

http://www.browsercam.com/ this costs $10 for up to ten url's

http://www.anybrowser.com/ FREE quite a few resources there but tread carefully ;-)

Re the text looping, that will probably be the screen resolution, in the uk factory defaults on packaged machines run at 800x600. so if you have designed it for a higher resolution then ir will loop the text on to the next line 9thats what i think has happened, or if it has gone to default font, then it may use Verdana or TNR verdana is a bigger font and so will take more space.