Fonts on the Web [duplicate]

Question

The collection of fonts available to a web developer is depressingly limited. I remember reading long ago about TrueDoc, as a way of shipping fonts alongside a website - but it seems to have languished. Has anybody used this, or something similar? Is it supported by enough browsers? Am I missing a good solution?

Note that a responsible web developer does not use fonts that are only available on Windows (and especially ones that are only available on Vista), nor do they use a technology that isn't supported by at least the majority of browsers.

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Update: As several people have pointed out, there's nothing wrong with providing a list of fallback fonts for people who don't have the specific font you use. I do in fact always do this, and didn't mean to suggest that this was wrong.

While my question was badly phrased, what I meant was that a designer should not make too many assumptions about what the client will have available. You should plan for how all users will see your site, not just for people using your own preferred setup.

Answer 1

Safari, and to a lesser extent, Firefox 3 have support for @font-face in CSS, which lets you use custom fonts. You need to have the appropriate licence to distribute the font files though. These articles explain it in more detail:

• http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/30/custom-web-fonts-pick-your-poison/

Answer 2

This is a timely thread; we switched to Arial because Calibri is WAY small compared to all the other fallback fonts! It pained me greatly to switch to (gag) Arial because it's a crap copy of Helvetica:

http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html

The sizing difficulties (too big if you go with a "c" font as your standard; too small if you go with something normal) are described in detail here:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/css-vistas-new-fonts/

I will miss Calibri's beautiful hand-tuned RGB aliasing a lot, but it was just impossible to deliver a good experience for most users without demanding Calibri be installed. It's reasonably common, as it comes with Office 2007 (Win/Mac) and of course Vista.. but it's far from universal, so it's a little irresponsible to rely heavily on it for a global web audience.