Using Unsafe Fonts for Web

[vunet]

Hello,
I need a custom font, say Verlag, to be used for some headers of the
website. Can anyone recommend or direct me to a technique or hack to
use custom non-standard web-unsafe fonts? I do not want to use images
because I'd need too many of those. Of course, I 'd like to find a
cross-browser solution.
Thanks in advance.

[Jonathan N. Little]

vunet wrote:

Hello,
I need a custom font, say Verlag, to be used for some headers of the
website. Can anyone recommend or direct me to a technique or hack to
use custom non-standard web-unsafe fonts?

Unsafe? You do not contract so disease you know if you select a odd
font, the users without specified font will just see an alternate. That
is why it is good practice to specify alternatives that are common and
related in characteristics.

I do not want to use images
because I'd need too many of those. Of course, I 'd like to find a
cross-browser solution.
Thanks in advance.

Images are really your only option, other than revising your design, as
Jukka loves to write "stop wanting this"
--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

[Andy Dingley]

On 3 Jun, 14:35, vunet <[e-mail]:

I need a custom font, say Verlag, to be used for some headers of the
website. Can anyone recommend or direct me to a technique or hack to
use custom non-standard web-unsafe fonts?

No. Sorry.

There just aren't any techniques out there that have "worthwhile"
levels of support and compatibility to recommend them for everyday
use.
sIFR is about the best (server-side rendering into Flash) if you
_MUST_ do this.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

You could also look at Bitstream TrueDoc, M$oft WEFT and CSS 3 (ish),
for the future

[Steve Swift]

Andy Dingley wrote:

There just aren't any techniques out there that have "worthwhile"
levels of support and compatibility to recommend them for everyday

Well, you could use a table, or DIV's, with an image of each successive
character in each cell/div.

I'm sure that's what some sites must be doing (the ones where Opera says
it is downloading 90+ images... :-)

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[vunet]

On Jun 3, 11:13 am, Andy Dingley <[e-mail]:

On 3 Jun, 14:35, vunet <[e-mail]:

I need a custom font, say Verlag, to be used for some headers of the
website. Can anyone recommend or direct me to a technique or hack to
use custom non-standard web-unsafe fonts?

No. Sorry.

There just aren't any techniques out there that have "worthwhile"
levels of support and compatibility to recommend them for everyday
use.

sIFR is about the best (server-side rendering into Flash) if you
_MUST_ do this.http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

You could also look at Bitstream TrueDoc, M$oft WEFT and CSS 3 (ish),
for the future

Thank you all. I am considering Andy's and Steve's suggestions.

[dorayme]

In article <48********@news.greennet.net>,
Steve Swift <St***********@gmail.comwrote:

Andy Dingley wrote:

There just aren't any techniques out there that have "worthwhile"
levels of support and compatibility to recommend them for everyday

Well, you could use a table, or DIV's, with an image of each successive
character in each cell/div.

Why would you do that rather than the images just follow each other
inline or text done elsewhere and screenshot en masse?

--
dorayme

[Steve Swift]

dorayme wrote:

Why would you do that rather than the images just follow each other
inline or text done elsewhere and screenshot en masse?

Well, If that isn't the "royal you", then I'd put each character image
into its own cell in a borderless table simply to prevent wrapping
splitting strings of character images that represent words. This was for
a page header, and wrapped text looks odd there, and would look doubly
odd if the wrapping split words.

Of course, being me, I'd be happy trying <NOBRaround a bunch of <IMG>
tags, to see if that worked. It's certainly easier.
I have the advantage of working in a controlled environment where only
IE6 and Firefox2 are supported, so I'm not obliged† to care if it
doesn't work in other browsers. It doesn't stop me caring, of course.

† "obliged" = "paid"

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[dorayme]

In article <48********@news.greennet.net>,
Steve Swift <St***********@gmail.comwrote:

dorayme wrote:

Why would you do that rather than the images just follow each other
inline or text done elsewhere and screenshot en masse?

Well, If that isn't the "royal you", then I'd put each character image
into its own cell in a borderless table simply to prevent wrapping
splitting strings of character images that represent words. This was for
a page header, and wrapped text looks odd there, and would look doubly
odd if the wrapping split words.

No royal you. I am Australian and I am looking directly at you. I am not
following any of this? If it is a heading, and you wanted fancy, why
would you do your one char per cell instead of making a nice heading in
Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting as a gif or png? Or not at least
putting a set of chars that make a word into a cell (given your penchant
for cells)?

Why is this earth so puzzling?

--
dorayme

[Steve Swift]

No royal you. I am Australian and I am looking directly at you. I am not

following any of this? If it is a heading, and you wanted fancy, why
would you do your one char per cell instead of making a nice heading in
Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting as a gif or png? Or not at least
putting a set of chars that make a word into a cell (given your penchant
for cells)?

Because my page supports millions of people, all with different names,
and puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)
but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

My header (and user base) are hypothetical, but the OP mentioned that
the number of variations made using images for the whole header
un-acceptable.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[dorayme]

In article <48********@news.greennet.net>,
Steve Swift <St***********@gmail.comwrote:

No royal you. I am Australian and I am looking directly at you. I am not
following any of this? If it is a heading, and you wanted fancy, why
would you do your one char per cell instead of making a nice heading in
Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting as a gif or png? Or not at least
putting a set of chars that make a word into a cell (given your penchant
for cells)?

Because my page supports millions of people, all with different names,
and puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)
but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

My header (and user base) are hypothetical, but the OP mentioned that
the number of variations made using images for the whole header
un-acceptable.

You are thinking some script or server side generating the headers? OK,
in that case. Otherwise, if they are hand made, what I said would be
better.

(I have now and then toyed with the idea of making my own image-font
set. But what a pain to use!)

--
dorayme

[Michael Wojcik]

Steve Swift wrote:

[dorayme wrote:]

>If it is a heading, and you wanted fancy,
why would you do your one char per cell instead of making a nice
heading in Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting as a gif or png? Or
not at least putting a set of chars that make a word into a cell
(given your penchant for cells)?

Because my page supports millions of people, all with different names,
and puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)
but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

Generating GIFs of complete names on the fly isn't hard, and that
would let you typeset them properly (kerned, with ligatures, etc),
rather than lumping them into separate cells. And since browsers would
cache them, you wouldn't have to regenerate the GIF for refreshes, so
rendering would be faster on subsequent requests.

On a reasonably fast server, a CGI script that whacked the name into a
LaTeX template, ran it through pslatex, and rendered the output to GIF
with Ghostscript would probably suffice.

But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University

[Andy Dingley]

On 4 Jun, 09:04, Steve Swift <[e-mail]:

my page [...] puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)

The "John Bull printing set" approach. It works, but you lose
kerning. It's OK for ransom notes and OCR A, but for any "aesthetic"
use of a typeface the amount that you've lost will far exceed any
possible benefit of selecting the starting font.

By the time you've mangled it through this process, it'll look worse
than if you'd just specified Comic Sans in the CSS.

but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

That's a trivial bit of code, which you've been able to download as
ready-built PHP for something like 10+ years now. Fear of bitmap
generation code is no excuse.

[Ben C]

On 2008-06-04, Andy Dingley <di*****@codesmiths.comwrote:

On 4 Jun, 09:04, Steve Swift <[e-mail]:

>my page [...] puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)

The "John Bull printing set" approach. It works, but you lose
kerning.

Most browsers (Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9) don't do kerning anyway. But
they do support proportional fonts.