Friday, January 22, 2010Tutorial: using @font-face to embed fonts
So @font-face has been around for a while now, and everyone has been ranting and raving about how it will change the web.
Services like typekit have arrived to try and tackle the issue of licensing and distribution.
However the technology is here. It's cross browser, and it works today. So, this is a quick tutorial in how to easily and quickly ACTUALLY use font-face to embed a font on your site.
Step 1: select a font.
The first step in embedding a non-standard font on your site is to choose a font. Now, to avoid the licensing issues, the site of choice (in my opinion) is http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ - their tag line is 100% free for commercial use - just what we want :)
Font Squirrel have a small blue pill shaped icon with FF in it that indicates if a font-face kit is available for that font, you want to select one of the fonts that has this icon. The font-face kit includes a stylesheet with the correct font-face declarations and also the necessary font files (including the funny EOT files that IE uses). It IS possible to make these files yourself, however this is beyond the scope of a beginner tutorial like this.
Step 2: Include the CSS
Now, having downloaded the font-face kit, we move the files into our site directory (inside the css/ folder). Now open up the stylesheet that came in the font-face kit. We want to copy the @font-face rules out and place them in our site's stylesheet (or their own, however you choose to structure it). Either way, we need the CSS for the fonts to be available to the browser before the CSS file that uses them.
What's actually going on here?
To help with understanding, let's disect the @font-face declaration in all it's glory:
@font-face
{
font-family: 'MyFont';
src: url('fonts/MyFont.eot');
src: local('My Font'),
url('fonts/MyFont.ttf') format('truetype');
}
The first line tells the browser we are defining a font face, then inside the braces we are telling it the name we want to use for the font, in this case 'MyFont'. This font-family: declaration can be anything you want, you might call it 'SuperDuperHeadingFont' - this is the bit you will use in your stylesheet when referring to the font.
The second line of these @font-face calls is the first in a chain of src: declarations, it references an .eot file, which allows Internet Explorer to render the font (curiously, IE has had the ability to do this for years, but only with EOT font files.. the other browsers support TTF and OTF files). It's important that the EOT declaration is first, so that IE doesn't think the font-face call has failed.
The second src declaration is for the other browsers, it contains a call to local('My Font') which instructs the browser to check the local system for that font before downloading the remote version (it makes no sense to download the embed if the user's system already has the font).. and the second call is to url('fonts/MyFont.ttf') format('truetype') - this tells the browser to grab the TTY file from the url fonts/MyFont.ttf, it also instructs the browser to expect the TTF file to be a truetype font.
Step 3: Use the embedded font in your normal CSS
Now, with the above example, we are able to now use MyFont as a font declaration in our CSS files. So if we were to use that font for the H1s on our page we would simply add:
h1 { font-family: MyFont, Helvetica, Arial, san-serif; }
Remember to always stack your fonts, just in case a user's browser can't display the custom font, that way the page wont go completely haywire. In this case i've assumed that MyFont is a san-serif and stacked Helvetica and Arial under it, so we should gracefully degrade to a similar standard font if their browser doesn't support the external font (for example, at the time of writing, iphones don't support @font-face).
Ok, so there we have it, @font-face using fontsquirrel's font face kits. You can view an example on my studio website: http://outsideinmedia.co.uk - the headings and body copy use a custom font called Titillium.
Hat tip to fontsquirrel.com, for making cross browser font embedding free and easy for beginners :) Enjoy!
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Reader Comments (55)
very useful!
Maybe this is me talking nonsense, but it seems like Google isn't a company run strictly by the top and they seem to be doing quite well.
Do you like this better than cufon?
@Natetronn: cufon is a javascript based font replacement engine. While it's great, in that it doesn't require any plugins etc, it still creates image (or canvas) based text, which is not really ideal.
The advantage of @font-face is that it is actually rendering standard system text - better for SEO and doesn't require any Javascript or plugins...
So in answer to your question, i wouldn't say i like it more than cufon, simply that i think it's a cleaner solution than cufon.
good job...
Thanks for the information and post.
Great Post. Very useful.
Thank You :)
Nice Article. I am attempting to use 4 @font-face fonts in a pulldown selector, but I must be referencing the font names incorrectly as they don't change.
Do you have any suggestions ?
thanks so much
Awesome tips! This is really useful for those who are starting in web designing.
Thanks for the tutorial!
this is great i always wanted to use custom fonts on my sites .. can i use this method with my own fonts or i'll have to use fonts of this site?
Awesome! it was really helpful tutorial.....
Great Post. I'm stoked that this let's me use one of my favorite fonts now on my site. Thanks for the tip. LB
Great interesting articles loved to explain about it to all my friends
I’m a young webdesigner ! very useful and so informative,thanks and keep this effort up.
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