how do I add a new font for my RoR website (hosted on linux, developed on Mac) ????

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

Any pointers where to start digging re how I could use some fonts (e.g. http://www.iconian.com/c.html ) in my Rails web site?

I develop on Mac, but deploy to a Linux box. Does this mean I have to work out how to install fonts on both operating system I guess? Would I then only have to refer to the fonts in the CSS style sheet such that my RoR application beyond this would need no further modification?

2

Greg,

You might want to read up a bit more on how fonts are used on the web. If you declare specific fonts to be used in your CSS, it only tells the browser to try and use it. If the person browsing the site/application doesn't have the font specific installed on their application, then they it'll default to a font it does have. Here is some information that explains it.

* Fonts

Hope that helps..

Robby

3

oh, that makes sense - so for our Web Apps we’re pretty much stuck to common denominator fonts for the browsers then?

4

Greg Hauptmann wrote:

oh, that makes sense - so for our Web Apps we're pretty much stuck to common denominator fonts for the browsers then?

Exactly.

5

I guess you could go some sort of flash based approach, but then you have the issues associated with that, e.g. still need to have same text behind for screen readers, how do search engines then go indexing your site etc…

6

See http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/ and similar solution. Degrade gracefully and fully indexable. The big question is: do you really need it? The default system fonts can be enough to make a nice looking website without the need for such a solution.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

7

I feel compelled to point out that this is only part of the story. First of all, it is always possible to specify a weird font as first choice, as long as you're willing to put up with fallback to another font.

Second -- and more important -- is the fact that more and more browsers support dynamic font embedding as specified in the CSS2 standard; please see CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing – A List Apart and http://en.wikipedia.org/Dynamic_fonts . It's not universal yet, but with any luck, it will become more so.

Good luck!

Best,

8

Finally, when you absolutely need something exactly as you want, use images...

Cheers, Sazima