(HTML & CSS) What to do if user doesn't have desired font

[msimmons]

What happens if the user doesn't have the font I am using in CSS? I understand that it will go to the next font in line but what if I really want them to see it with the font specified?
Michael

[Rick Bull]

I don't think you can do a lot other than suppling back up fonts. Also you should supply a generic font as a last precaution (e.g. Tahoma's font-family is sans-serif), so for example you could have:

style="font-family:Tahoma, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"

And if the browser didn't have any of those fonts it would just use any sans-serif font it can find, so hopefully it would still be similar to the one you want. Take a look at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts....-font-families for all the generic font families you can use.

[msimmons]

I followed up behind one developer that put the fonts (files) he was using in the directory with the page... does that do anything or was that so people could d/l them?
Michael

[Rick Bull]

I don't think the browser will automatically download them, but there is a way to embed fonts on your page so that the user's machine will automatically download them. I don't know how to do it, or what (if any) browsers support them. http://www.w3.org/ must have some info on it.

[LucianoBraatz]

I don't know any way to force the browser to download the font you want. My suggestion is include a friendly line in the page asking the visitor to "download the font for best viewing".

[Mushroom Realm]

u cant force them to download it, but u can start the download, and then the decide whter they click cancel or not

[JoshT]

Both IE and Netscape has ways of adding fonts at one time, both were different methods of packaging the fonts, and both were limited to the scope of the web page for security and other issues (Win 9x has limits on the number of fonts installed before it uses up all its resources, I think). Like Rick, I never tried to figure it out.