I have noticed that when I test sites on external computers that often fancy fonts, such as script fonts like edwardiam Script and brush script, used on headers and titles are lost.
Is there a way to keep them from being lost and changed to boring Arial and times fonts?
Would it work to upload the font to the server? or would the cure be to make them graphics? Or some other way to ensure their feature as part of the style in the website.

Thanks.

Despite the enormous amount of fonts available, there are only a handful that are considered web safe, meaning, most users will have some version of the font. (http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html or http://www.typetester.org/).

In order for a user to see your font selection through basic css, they must have that font installed on their own computer. You can use text as an image to display special fonts but it is not recommended to use too much of that since it will increase page load time and more importantly, the search engines cannot read that so it is bad for SEO.

That being said, there are ways with flash or I have seen ways that require some extra work to use any font you want. http://net.tutsplus.com/javascript-a...ish-with-flir/

Thanks these links are helpful.

Many specialty fonts are unreadable on the internet anyway because of it's low resolution. In many design classes you would be taught to use font groups instead of just a single font.

That way if the first font is not on that person's computer it would default back to the second font in the group.

If the Specialty Font is part of a Page header, you can make it into a graphic.

Go look at the main page of my Marketing Sanctuary site. I used a Specialty 3D Font for the Header and some abstract text on the BANG graphic below it. While both do add to the page load time, the extra time is not excessive.

It's not usable outside of Safari yet, but the newest beta Safari (4) has an experimental font-engine on it that allows fonts to be defined by the user, just like a cursor can be (though not often). I hope to see more of this in the future, because I refuse to use Flash for font-replacement. It may develop into a standard eventually, and I hope it does.

Yes, wayfarer07, I would like to see that too. I have never used flash or any other method to replace fonts, I would prefer something easier.

I don't see what would be so hard about using something similar to the favicon system? If we can link to a favicon, for example, font files are small and it would be cool of we could just have that font file on the hosts' root page, something like "accord.fnt" could be the file name, and the browser just used that for reference of the font instead of someone's computer.

Well, I don't know that much about browsers so I'll stop daydreaming now...

Since virtually all of the HTML/CSS rendering is done on the user's machine, you would have to figure out a way to embed the font in the page. But, since every browser has a cache ability, I don't know why an object could not be created to display fonts that are needed for a particular page.

Then again, you would see a lot of header bloat when having to embed fonts.

But!, if all browsers could "license and distribute a set of say...100 favorite fonts,
and automatically load them to a font directory.....

But would that lead to browser bloat?

It's easier to use five basic fonts and forget most of the rest.

Back again to the purpose of web pages. To disseminate information!
Not to win Design contests!