Use unsafe web fonts safely in iWeb

Mar 30, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robleach

Lots of times, to get just the right look for your website, you want to use a font that is considered 'unsafe,' meaning unless someone viewing your page has that same font installed, the browser will pick some other default font to take its place. This obviously is undesirable. There are definitely more sophisticated and better ways to use non-web safe fonts, but if you want something easy and quick in iWeb, here's one thing you can do that's very easy and doesn't require any CSS or HTML code or widgets.

For any text using an unsafe web font, just rotate the text box marginally and iWeb will convert it to an image file so that your font appears as-is in any web browser. I asked if anyone noticed that the text was rotated and no one ever noticed.

There are two ways (that I know of) to rotate a text box. In either case, you first must click on the text box so that the corners have little white squares over them. Then hover your mouse over the corner while holding the command key, click and drag. The other option is to use the inspector. Under the tab that looks like a ruler, you can enter the number of degrees to rotate the font. I use this since it's easier to rotate an undetectable fraction (like 0.1 degrees).

I did this in iWeb 3.x. Of course, if you do this with a lot of text, then you're making your page bulky to download, so I only use it for fancy headings. Note, I have seen some buggy behavior with browsers not completely loading the images which (oddly enough) causes text to switch places. Hitting reload has always resolved this for me.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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