Re: preloading fonts or something like that...

Ben,
Unfortunately, you can only assume with 95% assurance, that a user's system
will be able to your selected fonts even if from the list "everyone" can
see.  In other words, the main groups of serif fonts (Times New Roman,
Courier) or sans serif fonts (Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif) will show to 95%
of users, and if you use other fonts the percentage drops dramatically.
It's always best to include fonts in your code as a selection of faces,
e.g., <font face="arial, helvetica, sans serif">, separated by commas.  The
browser will look for the first font in the set, failing to find that one
the next, and so on.  If none of the fonts in the code set match the font
names on the system, the system will try to furnish the font it does have
that most nearly approximates the font styles referred to in the code.
Failing at that, the user system will display its own default font face.

Remember that unless a person designs for publications or for the Web, they
probably only have the font set that came factory installed on their system,
and they either don't know how to or have no need or desire to add to that
inital font set.  Windows 95 comes with a different font set than Windows 98
does.  And Windows NT has another set entirely.  MacIntosh has a really
different font set, and even those that have the same name look different on
Mac than they do on PC with Windows.

Any special fonts that you want to use should be represented graphically to
assure they look the same on all browsers on all systems.  I don't know of a
way to forcibly load fonts onto a user system, and I'm not sure it is
ethically acceptable to do that.  Fonts don't just play from the cache on a
Windows machine, they have to be installed.  This requires a level of
intrusion on the user machine that would be tantamount to hacking.  It
wouldn't work at all on any machines behind a firewall or with
"anti-hacking" software installed.  So, it is certainly impractical,
probably immoral and possibly illegal to "preload" a font set to a Windows
user, and generally unnecessary to go to that trouble for the small
percentage of Mac users.

Gary Churchman
Director, Production and Design
MedSeek
gchurchman(at)medseek.com

----- Original Message -----
> 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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