I can has fonts! No, you can has fonts!

[mindstalk]

Some years ago I played with Livejournal styles, and customized it to use a font I liked. I later found I'd been using Windows, and the Edwardian Script ITC I liked there for display wasn't on Linux, but then I found Elegante, and it was even better. And I found URW Palladio, a Palatino derivative, for the body.

But these aren't common fonts, and while I tried putting in alternatives, like URW Chancery L or Monotype Corsiva or plain old Times, it's not the same. So all this time the way I saw my pages and the way you saw them probably weren't the same. Actually, on my eee, it wasn't the same either, since I'd forgotten how to get the fonts I liked.

But now, that's changed! I've learned about @font-face, and thus can serve the free fonts I want for my website. That doesn't work as easily for Livejournal, because Firefox doesn't like cross-domain font serves, but Google Webfonts has EB Garamond and FF will take that. And then it turned out that the the .htaccess magic here works too, so I can serve Elegante through LJ (and DW). Which means I could serve the URW Garamond No. 8 that I found before EB and am using on my computer, too, but eh, EB seems as good.

(I'd submitted Elegante to Webfonts, and I even got a friendly reply despite my not owning the font like they ask, but they don't like GPL as a font license and would like the author to submit under OFL. The author is some guy in Spain, I don't know if the e-mail I found is even him, the one in the license bounces.)

(Note Elegante is GPL, in the ttf-linex package of Ubuntu and maybe Debian? EB Garamond is Open Font License, and Garamond No. 8 under some custom free license.)

And ttf2eot converted the TTF (TrueType) files to EOT, so IE can probably stay with us cool kids. I don't have IE to test it with, though, I can just use my eee to verify that things work on a Linux box without the fonts.

So I predict a radical difference on everyone else's computers when they look now.

This is also how I've been seeing *your* LJ pages; I use "use my style". (Which also means I still see subjects on comments.)

Now if I could fix my DW style. It's very pretty but the header image has duplication and legibility problems.

Side note: seems odd that the Times website uses Georgia instead of Times New Roman. Wikipedia says even the physical paper doesn't use TNR any more. Though I guess Georgia is related.

Edit: worth noting this is related to my question about what fonts people use, not that anyone responded.
http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/345709.html

Comments

[februaryfour]

I don't know about this radical difference, since I override all styles with my own when I see people's pages too (like you do.) ^_^

[mindstalk]

Heh.
I turned that off for a bit. Arial everywhere! Back on.

[februaryfour]

When I clicked the link and got directed to LJ, I had to groan a bit--that's too much cursive for me. Computer fonts are clean and clear IMHO. ^_^ (Some of us like Arial a lot! ^_^)