Public domain fonts for steampunk web sites

[oldskoolpunk]

Now that browsers are starting to support the use of user-provided fonts again, it's worth looking for some good fonts for steampunk usage.  Large display fonts are easy to find. Ones which are both elegant and readable at 10 to 14 points are difficult to find in the public domain.  I've tried Trinigan and Loundon Decorative, but they simply do not scale down at all well.

It's not yet easy to set up your own fonts on web pages, but it is possible. See FontSquirrel for technical advice. Firefox 3.6 and the latest Internet Explorer can render these fonts; Opera support is not far off.

[lolliTragic]

Um, this has been doable for over a decade. There's just been some bickering amongst browser creators on which file types they'ed recognize, so most people used different methods to get around that.

People should stick to simple fonts for their main body text though, so that it's easy for everyone to read.

[Bethune]

It's a very good idea in theory and great for the hobby web designer...BUT (there's always a BUT isn't there) as a web designer for an university one of the main issues with web fonts is ACCESSIBLITY - particularly for people who have sight problems (deminished vision, colour blindness all the way up to blindness).

As long as everyone uses proper care to ensure that their CSS provides for alternative means - such as large type or unobstructed and correct layout design for screen readers - so that visitors with impaired vision can also enjoy your site then there should be no problem.

(Also - if you are a FLASH whizz you will probably have been using exactly what font you wanted to anyway. Though - again - there are accessiblity issues.)

Incidently, can I suggest DA FONT as a good resource for free fonts. We use it in our design department all the time.

--- Don't take from my comments that I am being in any way negative to your post. It *IS* very good news, but I just like to keep peoples' attension focused that there are people who find the web as it is now hard to read - much less when we all start using fancy-nancy fonts! LOL

[Mr. Boltneck]

Interesting link! Thank you.
I have to say that as a designer, I have been both looking forward to and dreading the day that things settle down enough with browser specs that we can all start using server-side fonts reliably. On the one hand, yes, I will no longer have to make cunning plans around font stacks in CSS, or at least will not be limited to them.
On the other, I can see where this is going to produce some spectacularly bad design. And not just in the crazed-magpie-on-Geocities way. I can see the same "professionals" who produce really gimmicky over-the-top websites (that mostly express the ability to produce gimmicky OTT websites) going absolutely hog-wild with this. Particularly since a CSS property can be manipulated via JavaScript, so presumably you could make fonts change on the fly in response to user actions or other events. I'm sure that Razorfish and similar high-priced web-bling mongers will be all over this.

[oldskoolpunk]

I have to say that as a designer, I have been both looking forward to and dreading the day that things settle down enough with browser specs that we can all start using server-side fonts reliably.

I know, I know.  I dread it too.  It will be so tempting to put body text in undersized display fonts, which will look terrible.

[oldskoolpunk]

To see what it would look like, I redid the home page of http://www.aetherltd.com with dynamically loaded fonts. Only the titles and captions are in nonstandard fonts; so far I haven't found a period free font useful at sizes below 16 point. ITC Victorian and some of ITC's Caslon derivatives are readable at 12 point, but those aren't free fonts.

(Downloadable fonts will work on Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4.x, Opera 9.x, Safari 4.x, MSIE 7.x, and the iPad.)

[pakled]

One possible workaround would be to convert some of your fontwork to a graphic. If you have Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro, Gimp (that one's free), or some similar program (Adobe has some...expensive ones...

Another thing to look for are dingbat fonts, which are (for the uninitiated) small pictures tied into each letter; say type in a 'c', and get some Celtic border bit. They're not nearly as common, but you can always tie graphics into links, etc., and get roughly the same effect (but then I'm so crusty about HTML, I actually write pages in Wordpad...

[oldskoolpunk]

As an experiment in readability, I'm trying a body font from the H.P. Lovecraft Society on the Aetheric Message Machine home page. This is a trial; I'm still looking for a good body font. Comments, please.

[mirabella]

The recent age allows for something referred to as "dynamic text replacement." It allows you to use any font you want anywhere on your site... using a generator of your choosing. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext/ is a link to a site that talks about it... I use it and am very thankful I do not have to use images to show my fancy anymore.

[oldskoolpunk]

The recent age allows for something referred to as "dynamic text replacement." It allows you to use any font you want anywhere on your site... using a generator of your choosing. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext/ is a link to a site that talks about it... I use it and am very thankful I do not have to use images to show my fancy anymore.

Actually, that does use images of the characters; it generates them on your server. There are about ten other ways to do the same thing. But those tricks are no longer necessary. Now you can get the user's browser to render any font you can distribute. This has certain advantages; for example, if the user increases the text size in their browser, the fonts get not only bigger, but smoother. Cut and paste still work.

[lolliTragic]

Dynamic text replacement scripts have been around for many, many years as it was one of the common place work arounds for browsers which didn't render the font type you wished to use or didn't provide the support for it. Again, this has been around a long time (about two decades, as it was supported in IE5), it's not new. What's "new" is that it's more widely supported by browsers and more font types are supported.