font

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Fonts - master group for LHF

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We store a master group of fonts in the folder: U:\User Data\All Users\Fonts

This has all the fonts that we've come across over the years.

In order to update the fonts of a PC:

1) Open control panel

2) Select the Fonts icon

3) Go to the master fonts folder, select all fonts, copy, and paste into the Fonts window opened in the previous step.

NOTE:  Some fonts will not copy...so monitor the copy so that you can answer the prompts (otherwise it will stop and not finish until you do).

Real Fonts on the Web with TypeKit

It recently came to my attention that there is a very cool feature of CSS called @font-face that I had never heard of before. Since Internet Explorer 5.5 & a few versions ago of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome this CSS feature has been supported. It allows you to load any font in particular formats into the browser for use on any site.

The reason we haven't seen beautiful type everywhere is that few font foundries licensed any of their fonts ifor use on the web. Enter TypeKit. TypeKit is a web-font hosting and serving service that has been slowly building up a repository of fonts that you can license on a yearly basis to use legally on the web. The price is very economical, and as of a few days ago, they serve a good collection of Adobe Fonts.

I did some testing and its laughably easy to setup the service and install the fonts on your site. I set it up on my FireflyPhoto.ca site briefly, but I will be testing it more extensively on TimSchafli.ca.

The service automatically serves the right font files to Internet Explorer or the other browsers (of course Internet Explorer likes to use its own standard for the CSS implementation) and should the browser STILL not be able to display the fonts, you can still fall back to the next font in the CSS font-family stack.

You can sign up at FontKit.com and the subscription we want is probably the "Portfolio" service which gets us: Unlimited Fonts per Site, Usage on Unlimited Sites, access to their entire font library, and 500,000 pageviews a month. All this for the low-low price of $49.99 USD / year.

With the addition of the Adobe Fonts, they now have all the fonts we regularly use such as Adobe Garamond and Myriad with - get this - all the weights. That means we can, for example, us real italic Adobe Garamond on our sites WITHOUT using images saved for web. All the text remains purely HTML which means it's GREAT for Search Engine Optimization while the CSS rules make it look very pretty.

Fonts I'd love to use on the web (and now we can): Adobe Garamond Pro, Myriad Pro, Chaparral Pro, Minion Pro, Caflisch Script Pro, Bickham Script Pro.