Web Typography  -  November 4, 2008

Typography is a thriving industry, Printing and Media have an absolutely massive base of different fonts and styles that are constantly being developed for various projects. So how come the Web has been left behind so much?
At the moment, if you want to choose a font for use on the internet, you are pretty limited. In fact, you are pretty much stuck with one of the following ‘web safe’ fonts: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Lucida Console, Times New Roman, Impact, Tahoma, Courier New or Comic Sans. Although this would have been fine 5 years ago, they have become more than a little stale and well over used.
I think its high time that this changed, and, it looks like with CSS 3 there is some progress:

@font-face {
font-family: 'The New Font';
src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/');
}

The following line of code will tell your browser where it can get the font, so it will follow the link, download and use it to pull in the correct font. You will also have the ability to add shadow, emboss, add effects, stretch and smooth fonts. Sound a bit too good to be true? Well unfortunately it will be ages before we can successfully use this technique to import fonts, with browser’s typically slow uptake of CSS3.. You can imagine how long we are going to be stuck with IE7 and its already aging CSS engine.

daviess at 4:19 pm

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