embedding fonts?

[Alabaster]

Hi,

I would like to embed a font into my website so that all users see the
correct font without having to have it installed on their system.

From what I've found on the internet, most recommend converting to EOT
with WEFT. But this is only compatible with IE, and I and most of my
viewers will be using Firefox.

Another alternative I've found is the Truedoc format, but it appears
that the only way to convert to this format is with $150-200 software.

The only other way I can think of is to re-author my entire page in
Flash or some other format, but I don't want to do this.

Is there another way? Or am I stuck using system fonts?

Thanks,
chris.

 

[Mark Parnell]

Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, Alabaster

I would like to embed a font into my website so that all users see the
correct font without having to have it installed on their system.

Is there another way?

Use an image.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I would like to embed a font into my website so that all users see the
correct font without having to have it installed on their system.

Stop wanting that. One font does _not_ fit all.

From what I've found on the internet, most recommend converting to EOT
with WEFT.

But even those who recommend it don't use it, except for trivial demos about
the technology itself. It just isn't practical, and if you try to use it for
something real, you'll run into problems.

The only other way I can think of is to re-author my entire page in
Flash or some other format, but I don't want to do this.

Good for you.

Or am I stuck using system fonts?

Stop worrying about fonts. Fonts are something to be chosen by the user.
At most, use body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica; }. It doesn't do much harm
on the average, and for most users, it probably implies a small improvement
in readability.

You might then have time and energy to think about interesting content.

 

[Jake]

Stop wanting that. One font does _not_ fit all.

Let's just assume, just for once, that the OP knows what he's doing.

But even those who recommend it don't use it, except for trivial demos about
the technology itself. It just isn't practical, and if you try to use it for
something real, you'll run into problems.

WEFT-generated fonts work just fine with IE users; very practical, no
problems.

Good for you.


Stop worrying about fonts. Fonts are something to be chosen by the user.
At most, use body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica; }. It doesn't do much harm
on the average, and for most users, it probably implies a small improvement
in readability.

Not much of a choice, is it? Even for text-only pages.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

WEFT-generated fonts work just fine with IE users; very practical, no
problems.

Of course, you will not create an exception to the rule that people who
advertize WEFT here cannot provide any real-life examples (with "real life"
defined as something else than a trivial page, typically with lorem ipsum
text as content).

 

[Jake]

Of course, you will not create an exception to the rule that people who
advertize WEFT here cannot provide any real-life examples (with "real life"
defined as something else than a trivial page, typically with lorem ipsum
text as content).

And, of course, you'll never let us in on these 'problems' you claim
exist or how the use of embedded fonts is 'impractical'... ;-)

regards.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I only quoted what you quoted, since the only content in your answer
is the total absence of any example, as described above.

 

[Andy Dingley]

And, of course, you'll never let us in on these 'problems' you claim
exist or how the use of embedded fonts is 'impractical'... ;-)

Doesn't work outside IE/Win. Bit of a biggy that one.

Secondly there have been a few fonts I've really wanted to do this with
(corporate branding issues), sometimes a font or glyph that was created
specifically for that customer, and in every case WEFT has had problems
in making that particular font work on any platform. I don't really
need to embed Verdana, but that seems to be about the limits of current
WEFT. It's a fine example of demoware - good for demonstrating what it
ought to do, useless for actually doing it.

I'd love to use font embedding - but I'm still waiting to see this
develop to a usable and stable technology. Unless of course _you_ have a
practical demo to show us....

 

[Jake]

Doesn't work outside IE/Win. Bit of a biggy that one.

Secondly there have been a few fonts I've really wanted to do this with
(corporate branding issues), sometimes a font or glyph that was created
specifically for that customer, and in every case WEFT has had problems
in making that particular font work on any platform. I don't really
need to embed Verdana, but that seems to be about the limits of current
WEFT. It's a fine example of demoware - good for demonstrating what it
ought to do, useless for actually doing it.

I'd love to use font embedding - but I'm still waiting to see this
develop to a usable and stable technology. Unless of course _you_ have a
practical demo to show us....

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/newg/weft.htm (IE, of course)

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/newg/weft.htm

We can see rather immediately from the URL itself that my prediction was
right:
Of course, you will not create an exception to the rule that people who
advertize WEFT here cannot provide any real-life examples (with "real life"
defined as something else than a trivial page, typically with lorem ipsum
text as content).

Instead of presenting a real life page, you throw us a pointless WEFT demo
you just souped up (using fonts that are both ugly and very hard to read,
as advocates of WEFT typically use in their foolish demos).

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Doesn't work outside IE/Win. Bit of a biggy that one.

However, WinIE is the browser which is most in need of being
helped-out by this technology, so the arguments do even out to some
extent.

Secondly there have been a few fonts I've really wanted to do this
with (corporate branding issues), sometimes a font or glyph that was
created specifically for that customer, and in every case WEFT has
had problems in making that particular font work on any platform.

I have to say that my only dealings with WEFT3 were to compensate for
WinMSIE's execrable support for unusual character repertoires. To
that extent, they were successful, and I was hoping to write some web
pages on the successful results. But I haven't had time yet.
Meantime, interested readers could consult the discussion which
includes this posting

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design/msg/2f48e144a18a19ea

Hope that's vaguely useful. I think the best test pages right now are
the ones cited by the other main participant in that thread, Gérard
Talbot.

 

[Jake]

We can see rather immediately from the URL itself that my prediction was
right:
Of course, you will not create an exception to the rule that people who
advertize WEFT here cannot provide any real-life examples (with "real life"
defined as something else than a trivial page, typically with lorem ipsum
text as content).

And that would prove ... what exactly?

Try google.com if you want to try searching for some 'real life
examples' -- although how they would differ from the page shown you
haven't said (and I guess you never will).

Instead of presenting a real life page, you throw us a pointless WEFT demo
you just souped up (using fonts that are both ugly and very hard to read,
as advocates of WEFT typically use in their foolish demos).

Yep. Produced on the spur of the moment in response to Andy's comments
-- 6 embedded fonts on one page. Fonts chosen to show clearly that
they're not Arial and Times New Roman ;-) ...... as well as the ease
with which it can be done.

Seems to contradict your claims "...It just isn't practical, and if you
try to use it for something real, you'll run into problems..." doesn't
it?

Unless you have something to add, I guess this conversation's come to
its natural conclusion.

I'll just let the jury decide on this one.

Regards.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

And that would prove ... what exactly?

My point exactly. Advocates of WEFT, when asked to present real-life
examples, show nothing or show dummy demos - and babble endlessly.

 

[Chaddy2222]

And that would prove ... what exactly?

Ahh well. If I had a site designed for me with font that was that
unreadable...... I would demand a refund.
You can't tell me (or anyone else for that matter) that you would
expect someone to use that type of font on a "real" site and expect
people to read the content.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Advocates of WEFT, when asked to present real-life
examples, show nothing or show dummy demos - and babble endlessly.

That had been pretty much my conclusion, until Gérard Talbot showed me
how it could be used to support Canadian Syllabics in MSIE. I'm
hoping to write it up at some point, but, as I said before:

Meantime, interested readers could consult the discussion which
includes this posting

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design/msg/2f48e144a18a19ea

Users of web-compatible browsers are still free to install and use
appropriate fonts - they are neither helped nor hindered by this
IE-specific option. I'm not *madly* keen in investing this extra work
specifically for IE users, but it sure beats the fake Latin-1 fonts
which some native-Canadian communities were offering as a means to
display their subset of syllabics.

This would also be good for other writing systems which IE tends to
botch[1], such as Persian, Urdu, polytonic Greek, and so on (review
the ones fingered by Andreas Prilop from time to time for examples).

[1] for the reason discussed at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/browsers-fonts.html#msie

Basically, MSIE decides which font to use for each group of characters
(e.g Arabic), based on what the font says it supports. If one or more
of the needed characters happens to be missing from the chosen font,
it makes no effort to locate it elsewhere. Persian and Urdu have a
few characters which aren't in the mainstream Arabic "alphabet" and so
may be missing, but IE doesn't care: if the font says it supports
Arabic, then it uses it, basta. Anyone interested in the details can
refer to the web page. Doubtless the usual suspects will show up to
tell us that the problem will be solved if we only nominate the
appropriate named fonts in the CSS, so I'd better say right now that
they're wrong, and I won't bother to contradict them one by one when
they show up.

Thus, MSIE is the commonly-used browser which, to my way of thinking,
is *most* in need of being helped out by the WEFT technique. If you
think MSIE ought to show up its own shortcomings, then I'd be only too
happy for you to pay no attention to this idea; but, if you care more
that all your readers - even those who are so misguided as to use MSIE
as a web browser - get something readable, then I grudgingly present
this option for your consideration.

cheers

 

[Jake]

My point exactly. Advocates of WEFT, when asked to present real-life
examples, show nothing or show dummy demos - and babble endlessly.

Still not keen to justify your claims "...It just isn't practical, and
if you try to use it for something real, you'll run into problems..." ?

Maybe next time, eh?

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Talbot?=]

Alan J. Flavell a écrit :

However, WinIE is the browser which is most in need of being
helped-out by this technology, so the arguments do even out to some
extent.




I have to say that my only dealings with WEFT3 were to compensate for
WinMSIE's execrable support for unusual character repertoires.

I agree that WEFT3 could be improved.

To

that extent, they were successful, and I was hoping to write some web
pages on the successful results. But I haven't had time yet.
Meantime, interested readers

One small comment I wish to make. Most of the time, interested people in
embedded (dynamic/synthetic) webfonts are interested in them for purely
cosmetic reason, for aesthetic reasons or for over-excessively
controlling purposes (controlling entirely how a webpage appear on the
user/visitor's monitor screen). I think web fonts can make a difference
in cases of cultural assimilation, where languages which are absent on
the web, for societies which are in the process of disappearing due to
absolute pure human/capitalist stupidity/idiocy and climate changes. And
even there, a .gif image saying "please download this truly Unicode font
in order to read webpages written in your native language" can
conveniently replace/compensate the recourse to webfonts.

could consult the discussion which

includes this posting

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design/msg/2f48e144a18a19ea

Hope that's vaguely useful. I think the best test pages

.... which are:

http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/AboriginalSansDemo.html

http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/AboriginalSerifDemo.html

http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/PigiarniqSerifDemo.html

right now are

the ones cited by the other main participant in that thread, Gérard
Talbot.

Hello Alan

Btw, Best wishes to you and your loves ones for Christmas

Gérard

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Talbot?=]

Jake wrote :

Let's just assume, just for once, that the OP knows what he's doing.
(...)

WEFT-generated fonts work just fine with IE users; very practical, no
problems.

It can lead to problems as Alan F. made me realized that I had created a
webfont from a font (nunacom font) which had no support for Unicode. The
thing is that such webfont may work for creating synthetic webfont in
MSIE 5+ but then, the Mozilla/Opera/Firefox/Safari user who may have
installed a truly Unicode font (like code2000) may not be able to read
the document despite using a unicode-capable font: this is very wrong.
This become illogical, inconsequent, incoherent.

See these screenshots:

http://www.gtalbot.org/GRAPHICS/PNG/LegislativeAssmNunavut_1.png
http://www.gtalbot.org/GRAPHICS/PNG/LegislativeAssmNunavut_2.png
http://www.gtalbot.org/GRAPHICS/PNG/LegislativeAssmNunavut_3.png

"Prosyl.ttf, which can be downloaded at
http://www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/English/font/
and nunacom.ttf (downloadable at nunatsiaq.com) are good examples of a
bad fonts to download and to install."

My recommendation to Microsoft:
include a true, complete Unicode font in their next os release and have
one which can be downloaded for free from windowsupdate.com so that none
of this could happen again. If this was done, I wouldn't see the need
and the justification for webfonts. If this was done, I would then most
likely be able to read, say, Inuktitut text in all kinds of browsers,
even/including with Lynx 2.8.5.

Gérard

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Jake wrote :


It can lead to problems as Alan F. made me realized that I had
created a webfont from a font (nunacom font) which had no support
for Unicode.

The key point is that they had built their custom font, in effect, as
a symbol font, in which normal ASCII (or Windows-1252) characters have
been swapped out in favour of the required custom characters. In an
HTML context, this technique is just as *bogus* in an embedded font as
it is in an installed font. My discussion of the general principles is
at http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

There is no need for this! (as you already know, but I'm writing for
the other readers). WEFT3 is quite capable of producing proper
unicode-based embedded fonts for this purpose.

The thing is that such webfont may work for creating synthetic
webfont in MSIE 5+ but then, the Mozilla/Opera/Firefox/Safari user
who may have installed a truly Unicode font (like code2000) may not
be able to read the document despite using a unicode-capable font:
this is very wrong. This become illogical, inconsequent, incoherent.

Those are the practical consequences, indeed; as I say, that method is
fundamentally bogus, and ought not to be used at all. There might
have been some excuse in the distant past, when unicode support was
not widespread in browsers; but the continued promotion of these
techniques (as was found at some Canadian Syllabics sites, such as the
one you mention) is deplorable. And it leads to a legacy corpus of
bogus HTML content, which its owners may not be competent to convert
into "real"(tm) HTML.

My recommendation to Microsoft: include a true, complete Unicode
font in their next os release and have one which can be downloaded
for free from windowsupdate.com so that none of this could happen
again.

It's a reasonable request, but I think a more-versatile solution would
be to let IE recognise when a character is missing in the selected
font, and to have some algorithm for finding it in another font, thus
producing the desirable result that is seen in Mozilla-family
browsers. Ideally there should be an algorithm for choosing the
character from a font which is cosmetically compatible with the
selected font, of course, but, when push comes to shove, even a
visually incompatible version of a glyph is better than displaying a
missing-glyph indicator (empty box or whatever). In the final
analysis, this still doesn't help users who don't have *any* font
containing the required character; but in practical terms it would go
a long way to remedying this shortcoming in IE.

This isn't only an issue for Canadian Syllabics, of course:
mathematical operators is a topic that gets a regular airing on HTML
authoring groups (in English and in German, to my knowledge, and
probably elsewhere too). Then there's Persian (Farsi), Urdu, Yiddish,
and other languages which use a few language-specific glyphs which
aren't used in the corresponding mainstream writing system (Arabic,
Hebrew, etc.) and tend to be missing from general-purpose fonts.

But I should be starting on writing that web page, instead of posting
too much detail here ;-)

Festive greetings