HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
F
IGURE
B-4 Testing Font Families
Downloadable Fonts
The best solution for fonts on the Web is to come up with a cross-platform font that could be
downloaded to the browser on the fly. Both of the major browser vendors have developed
their own versions of downloadable fonts. Microsoft's solution was called Dynamic Fonts
and Netscape's solution was called TrueDoc, but this technology was discontinued with
version 6.0 of the Netscape browser and should be avoided. Later, similar technology based
upon TrueType and OpenType fonts was added in browsers like Safari 3.1+, Opera 10+, and
Firefox 3.5+ browsers. The next section briefly discusses the viable downloadable font
technology in use at the time of this edition's writing.
Microsoft's Dynamic Fonts
Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows provides a fairly robust way to embed fonts in a
Web page. To include a font, you must first build the page using the
<font>
tag or style
sheet properties like
font-family
or
font
that set fonts. When creating your page, don't
worry about whether or not the end user has the font installed; it will be downloaded. Next,
use Microsoft's Web Embedding Fonts Tool
1
or a similar facility to analyze the font usage on
the page. The program should create an .eot file that contains the embedded fonts. Then,
add the font usage information to the page in the form of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) style
rules, as shown here:
@font-face {font-family:"Mufferaw EOT";
font-style:normal;
font-weight:normal;
src: url(mufferaw.eot);}
1
For the Web Embedding Font Tool (WEFT), see the Microsoft Typography site (www.microsoft.com/
typography/web/embedding/weft3/), but beware: it has not been updated for modern operating
systems, so proceed with caution.
