embeding fonts or changing to safe font?

Question

whats the better solution for embeding fonts problem?

drink a lot of vodka and try to embed custom font on web site or just leave that idea and use some web safe font?

Answer 1

Embedding fonts is technically doable these days, using @font-face rules. You will need to provide fonts in both EOT format (for IE) and TTF/OTF (for everyone else, with WOFF in the future). See eg. here for some strategies to serve different browsers as smoothly as possible.

The problem is more likely to be legal than technical. Conventional commercial font licenses do not permit this kind of font embedding.

Answer 2

I tell all my clients that anything in a nonstandard font has to be an image or (ugh!!!!) Flash with embedded fonts. Generally, the clients have no problem settling for helvetica/arial or some other standard web safe font for most of the content.

By the way, if you're trying to use a non-standard font for ALL content on your page, chances are (that is to say, not always, but most of the time) the design sucks anyway, and the technological hurdle of doing so is only part of the problem.