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Fonts > Vector vs Raster : Font Collecting : Anti-aliasing : Using fonts : Making Titles : Effects : Dingbats

~ fonts ~

Fonts. They're a fascinating thing, and can become quite addictive. I have nearly a thousand installed on my computer. On the right are some examples - these are mostly "freeware" - able to be downloaded for free from the web.

But once you've collected all these great fonts and want to use them on your site, how do you do it? You could just use them on your page as text, and sure they'll show fine for you - but how many of your viewers have them installed on their own machine? They'll probably see Times New Roman or Arial, or something else you didn't want. OK, you can try to get them to download and install your favourite font before they look at your site, but really - who is going to bother? But there IS a solution. You can save your text in the font & size you like as a graphics file. If it's just a 2-16 colour gif, it will download onto the page almost as quickly as text. I will call these "text-as-graphics".

There are drawbacks to these "text-as-graphics". For example, as far as the computer is concerned, they're just pictures, not words. This will mean that the content won't get picked up (by Search Engine Spiders, for example), and won't be seen by people browsing as text-only - including sight-impaired readers using voice-synthesising software. Putting an alt-tag can get around this problem to a certain extent, so if the actual word content is significant remember to add a full text tag.

You can do it for all of your text, but updating is a lot more time consuming than if it's just text. It's definitely worth the effort for titles and navigation elements that are unlikely to change, though, because it really adds to the overall "feel" of the site.

You can use PSP's text tool to add text to blank buttons that you've created or got from the web. You can also resize them & change the colours (although make sure you stick to the rules of the person who made them - some designers have an "add text only" rule, so that you don't ruin their work).

Although I work in full colour to create my text-graphics, I always use gifs, not jpegs as my final files. While this does limit me to 256 colours, it means there's no yucky jpeg-compression. If you've ever seen peoples' titles looking fuzzy or looking sort of smudged, that's probably why. It also means I can use transparency :) Remember my little lecture about the difference between jpegs and gifs?

An excellent font resource that includes a "What Font Is That?" search funtion is:

http://www.will-harris.com/use-type.htm