Re: preloading fonts or something like that...

Ben and Everyone else,

One option that I've not yet seen on the list regarding using specialized
fonts is the use of Microsoft's experimental Web-Embedding Font Technology
(WEFT). It's perpetually in beta, and in my tests, it works about 75% of the
time, depending on the font. AND, it seems to only work on MSIE 4.x and
above running under Windows (haven't had the chance to see if it'll work on
a Mac) -- allegedly Netscape has a similar yet different technology in the
works, but I've not found anything to try it with.

The idea of WEFT is to build a page using fonts on your system as you want,
no matter how esoteric they may be. You then process the finished page
through WEFT and it identifies all the fonts and variants used, and then
builds downloadable font sets using ONLY the characters in your page, and
only for those fonts that are not "locked" from distributable use (which,
I've found, are about 50% - 60% of the fonts on my system) -- this allegedly
prevents them from being "stolen" as the fonts are only in use during the
page view, and not actually installed into the system. It then writes
special embedding code for inclusion in your page, and then you upload the
page and the fonts to your server. Assuming everything worked out okay, when
you load the page on a compatible system that doesn't have these fonts, it
downloads them and displays the text accordingly.

It's worth a look if nothing else.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft2/default.htm to
read about and download the latest beta version of this program. I haven't
found a specific need for it in the pages I write, but it's nice to know
that the option, limited as it is, is there.

Good luck!

Kehvan M. Zydhek


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Russo" <benrusso(at)idirect.ca>
To: "HWG Techniques" <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2000 15:54
Subject: preloading fonts or something like that...


> Hello!
>
> I have about 500 fonts that I usually go through when designing graphics.
> Sometimes I find fonts that I'd like to use on the site.  Is there any way
I
> could preload these fonts so that the viewer's browser can see them?  If
> not, is there a list of all the fonts I CAN use?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Ben
>
>

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