How do I load external fonts into an HTML document?

Question

How do I load external font files into an HTML document.

Example: Make the text \"blah blah blah blah blah blah blah\" a custom font from a TTF file in the same dir

Answer 1

Microsoft have a proprietary CSS method of including embedded fonts (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533034(VS.85).aspx), but this probably shouldn't be recommended.

I've used sIFR before as this works great - it uses Javascript and Flash to dynamically replace normal text with some Flash containing the same text in the font you want (the font is embedded in a Flash file). This does not affect the markup around the text (it works by using a CSS class), you can still select the text, and if the user doesn't have Flash or has it disabled, it will degrade gracefully to the text in whatever font you specify in CSS (e.g. Arial).

Answer 2

I did not see any reference to Raphael.js. So I thought I'd include it here. Raphael.js is backwards compatible all the way back to IE5 and a very early Firefox as well as all of the rest of the browsers. It uses SVG when it can and VML when it can not. What you do with it is to draw onto a canvas. Some browsers will even let you select the text that is generated. Raphael.js can be found here:

http://raphaeljs.com/

It can be as simple as creating your paper drawing area, specifying the font, font-weight, size, etc... and then telling it to put your string of text onto the paper. I am not sure if it gets around the licensing issues or not but it is drawing the text so I'm fairly certain it does circumvent the licensing issues. But check with your lawyer to be sure. :-)

Answer 3

Regarding Jay Stevens answer: "The fonts available to use in an HTML file have to be present on the user's machine and accessible from the web browser, so unless you want to distribute the fonts to the user's machine via a separate external process, it can't be done." That's true.

But there is another way using javascript / canvas / flash - very good solution gives cufon: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ library that generates a very easy to use external fonts methods.

Answer 4

CSS3 offers a way to do it with the @font-face rule.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-webfonts/#the-font-face-rule

http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/

Here is a number of different ways which will work in browsers that don't support the @font-face rule.

Answer 5

If you want to support more browsers than the CSS3 fancy, you can look at the open source library cufon javascript library

And here is the API, if you want to do more funky stuff.

Major Pro: Allows you to do what you want / need.

Major Con: Disallows text selection in some browsers, so use is appropiate on header texts (but you can use it in all your site if you want)

Answer 6

Take a look at this A List Apart article. The pertinent CSS is:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Kimberley";
  src: url(http://www.princexml.com/fonts/larabie/kimberle.ttf) format("truetype");
}
h1 { font-family: "Kimberley", sans-serif }

The above will work in Chrome/Safari/FireFox. As Paul D. Waite pointed out in the comments you can get it to work with IE if you convert the font to the EOT format.

The good news is that this seems to degrade gracefully in older browsers, so as long as you're aware and comfortable with the fact that not all users will see the same font, it's safe to use.