Damned browsers and CSS2

2007-08-14

I've been searching around for the best way to use a custom font in websites. One would say that fonts, one of the most important parts of a website since it's used to display all the content, should be easily customized in a universal fashion. Guess not...

There's more to fonts then you'd think. I'm not really into them or the font scene, so I won't go into it here either.

Anyhow, when you're working with fonts on websites, there's really just the choice of three or four fonts. At least fonts you know are available at almost any visitor's computer. It kind of comes down to Arial, Verdana, Courier and Comic Sans (loved by some, hated by the rest).

But when it comes down to webdesign you want more freedom. Still it really sucks when you create a good website with your handpicked font and it turns out your visitors are missing half the fun because they don't have your obscure font installed.

Now I thought CSS2 offered the solution. It contains the great @font-face addition. But when I went looking for the CSS2 supported browsers, I quickly found this site, showing you in a neat table a nice red row indicating no support whatsoever for @font-face. Indeed, none of the mainstream browsers support @font-face! Wtf...

So my quest continues. Oh there are existing solutions. But I'm looking for one that doesn't involve any additional action from the visitor (like Bitstream). A solution not converting all texts to images (very reliable though ;). A solution as transparent as @font-face would be, but one that does work.

I've got my eye on one of them, but at first glance it doesn't look like they're supported by the mainstream browsers. Gonna have to take a look at it again though...