Crisp fonts for web

TB
Posted By
Treza_Blu
May 2, 2005
Views
753
Replies
3
Status
Closed
Can someone tell me how to get crisp fonts on the web? Is there certain fonts I should use? Is it ok to make them jpeg? Everything that I have tried has not given me satisfactory results.
Thank you
T

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Michael_D_Sullivan
May 2, 2005
GIFs are better for contrasty stuff like type and line art. JPEGs are intended for continuous tone images; with type, you will get artifacts along solid lines against a contrasting background instead of even antialiasing. If you a have an image that contains both type and continuous tone photos or art, you can slice it and save the type parts as GIF and the photo parts as JPEG, then have ImageReady prepare the HTML that stitches them together seamlessly.
LM
Lynch_Mike
May 2, 2005
Better to not use fonts as images – use html.
….but if you must:
Play with font properties on the top bar (or character/parragraph pallet) when in font editor. I find setting anti-aliasing (a/a) to "none" is best for very small fonts, for example. -Mike
JB
Jonathan_Balza
May 2, 2005
Setting anti-aliasing to "none" can be tricky business. Yes, it works for some fonts that have hinting built in, like Verdana and Arial, for example. However, it can get pretty nasty results if someone is using free fonts that haven’t been very well made. But the point is a good one, go through the different anti-aliasing modes on the fonts to get a nice look to your text.

Michael was spot on if you are using images to use GIF.

The reasons to use images would be:
* Images will be anti-aliased on all computers.
* Images will allow you access to using more fonts, as if you try and use something like Myriad, there’s no guarantee that font will be installed on their computer.
* Images allow for cooler layout tricks.

The reasons to not use images for fonts are:
* HTML will save on download time.
* HTML is easier to update.

Now, there are projects that offer the best of both worlds, like sIFR, where you embed text into flash dynamically, which will display any font correctly on any browser.

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