I’m just starting up making a site about Futurama - episode guides etc (I know, I know, it’s been done - but it keeps me occupied). The headings on each page (in red) are meant to be in a font called Britannic Bold, which is not exactly uncommon, but not everyone has it.
I’ve embedded the font as a .eot file, which should be automatically downloaded by IE users on PC - I know that’s not everyone, but one step at a time. Of course, it displays fine on my PC at home, coz I’ve got the font. However, I’m at work now, and it’s showing the second choice, Verdana.
I’m using IE on PC, so it should have downloaded the embedded font - but then again, I am at work and it’s possible that it’s blocked by some security measure. Would you mind taking a look, and telling me which font you get? (If you don’t know how to tell the difference, the Navigation Bar image says “Futuramarama” in Britannic Bold). What browser/OS are you using?
As a secondary target - I’d also like to know how the site looks on your monitor - is it too dark, too light? My monitor at home is quite light, this one at work is ridiculously dark - I’ve tried to make everything display ok at an average value.
The link is http://www.amywong.co.uk. Thanks very very much to anyone who can spare 3 mins to take a look.
p.s. Yep, there’s not much information on there at the moment, and I know of at least one broken link. It’s a work in progress, as I said
Embedded fonts are [del]almost[/del] always a bad idea. They’re highly browser, OS, and configuration dependent, as you discovered at work.
If you absolutely must have all of your text look a certain way across every platform, it’s time to consider using something like Flash. But that’s a completely different can of worms, so forget I said it.
My recommendation - either drop the embedded font and use something generic (“verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif”), or don’t sweat it too much if it doesn’t work for everybody.
In both Opera and IE with Windows XP, I see Verdana. The lightness/darkness looks fine to me.
You didn’t ask, but I find the green background soothing.
Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating the bandwidth problem. But the scale of the project is what’s preventing me from doing that. At the moment, when I finish a review of another episode, I just put its title in the database, and the php makes a heading from it. If I were to use graphics, I’d have to create one for every episode, every character… and on narrow screens with long episode names there’d be no wrapping.
I’m not too fussed if people are getting Verdana - it’s what was used originally and I have put it as the second choice. I just wonder why my embedding’s not worked? Oh well
You can use Flash to make dynamic text. Our designer uses it on some of our sites. You would just need one small(ish) Flash file like MyFont.swf. Then use PHP to pass the text to it. Maybe a function to call it each time to make it nice.
This is going to be really bad code, and it’s vbscript-style because I don’t know PHP but it’s the same general idea.
[get article properties from db]
title = GetTitle(title_from_db)
write title
...
...
function GetTitle(strTitle)
write "<embed object blah blah blah flash stuff...>"
write "<file=MyFontFile.swf?text=" & strTitle &">"
write "</blah blah blah more flash stuff>"
End Function
You will also want to detect flash and in your function give an option for writing the title in plain text for folks who have flash turned off.
If you go to a good Flash message board and ask how to do this, someone will be able to explain the Flash scripting needed. You can get a free 30-day trial of Flash MX from Macromedia.
It’s not as hard as it seems (er, I’ve never done it but trust me, you’ll be able to find tutorials) and will get you the result you want without the guesswork and unreliability of embedded fonts.
I’m pretty sure I’m getting Helvetica. Could be Verdana, I guess. Doesn’t look “wrong”.
MacOS X, Shiira 1.2.1
Generally speaking, you should avoid platform-specific code and/or browser-specific code, but this doesn’t seem to be hurting anything for the folks who aren’t on Windows/IE
Yeah - if the browser doesn’t have Britannic Bold, it should get it from the embedding (doesn’t seem to be working), and I’ve set up a backup of Verdana. However Verdana’s not normally on Macs, and I think they’ll display Helvetica instead. So you’re probably getting Helvetica.
It’s one of those things where it doesn’t actually matter if it doesn’t work, so I’m not too stressed about it. I don’t think I’m at the stage where I’ll start learning Flash just to get the right font, ZipperJJ, but thanks for the suggestion - I didn’t know you could do that - maybe if I were more of a perfectionist ;).
