Thoughts about Fonts

[CookieB]

Wondered if anyone can help me with a query about how fonts are handled by browsers.
A friend of mine wants to create a web site and has seen a font he really wants to use in the page heading. Problem is the font is an Apple font (Chancery). It made me wonder what would happen to his page if somebody viewed it on a PC. I warned him that the browser would only have available the fonts installed on the client computer, am I right about this? I can't see where else the fonts would be obtained from.
I suggested that he would be better creating a graphic of his title, however I am not sure how to go about this as we found that as the font got expanded it became 'fuzzy' any suggestions appreciated.

[NogDog]

Basically you are correct. There are some methods for supplying fonts from the server to the client, but they do not seem to be widely used/supported as far as I can tell. If it is important to get an exact match for a font for limited use (such as titles) then using an image is probably your best bet. Otherwise you should specify the desired fonts via CSS, supplying reasonable alternatives plus a "generic" font at the end of the list:

<style type="text/css">
h1 {
font-family: helvetica, "franklin gothic medium", arial, sans-serif;
}
</style>

In this example, helvetica will be used for H1 tags if the client has it, else it will use the franklin gothic medium font, or else arial. If it doesn't have any of those, then it will use its default sans-serif font.

[CookieB]

Thanks NogDog.
What he is really after is a script type font as a header with multi-colour lettering (bit like Google in fact). I'll tell him to use a graphic.

Have a good one

CookieB

[felgall]

You could just list several script type fonts.

h1 {font-family:"Apple Chancery","Comic Sans MS",cursive;}