September 12, 2007
Folks there’s a great new hidden feature lurking in iWeb 2.0 that will allow you to control how fonts are used and displayed for PC’s! I’m not actually going to write this out because it will take a long time to explain it. But you have this cool video to watch instead… fair deal no??? Watch and learn how to conquer the PC font war!
About This Article
This entry was posted by Suzanne on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 12:57 PM and was filed in the FAQ category using the tags: fonts, screencast, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Why does my blog entry URL use the default entry name rather than the name I gave it?
So Many Questions, So Few Answers
Great job, thanks.
You’re welcome :)
Ok, so is there something in that plist file that will determine whether a font is changed to an image? Or, can you say for Mac users, use the font, for Windoze users use an image instead?
That I don’t know. I don’t even know if that file contributes to whether something is converted to an image or not. I haven’t had a chance to tinker in that area yet. Perhaps some of you guys can test those theories. If anyone finds definitive answers, I’ll do a little video on it.
To answer Bryan: set value of Image key to true in the plist will force iWeb to produce text (of the changed font) as image instead of text.
iWeb even label the text box as image, in its canvas.
Ah, right… I mumbled about that setting in the video but mentioned I wasn’t sure what it did. Here it is. Change the word “false” to “true” (in red).
<key>AmericanTypewriter</key>
<dict>
<key>Generic</key>
<string>serif</string>
<key>Image</key>
<false/>
<key>Windows</key>
<string>Courier New</string>
</dict>
Thanks for the great info. A couple of questions though:
1. After changing the plist file as you suggest, how do you get iWeb to update the entire site? Publish All?
2. I’m using Hoefler Text on one of my sites. I modified the plist to tell windows to use Georgia since its a very similar font. I’m still very disappointed with how the fonts look on windows. Granted its been a year since I’ve given up on windows but do fonts really look that much worse on windows?
Hum… you know I’ve never tried that so I’m not sure. Your guess sounds logical though… a publish all logically *should* take care of that, but I’m guessing with you. If you try that, let me know what you find.
Here’s the thing with Windows. By default, the operating system shipped with rough fonts as the default. This applies to earlier versions by the way. I believe Vista has font smoothing enabled by default.
Anyway, in the earlier versions of Windows, you always had to go into the settings and enable what they call ClearType. Now why they didn’t just ship with that enabled I don’t know but I suppose that had something to do with memory optimization when PC’s still shipped with 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM.
So, the moral of the story here is, fonts won’t look bad on every PC, just the ones that haven’t been properly configured and you’ll find those in every business building on the planet. Corporately managed PC’s are always crap. JavaScript is turned off, font smoothing turned off, security applications blocking features that Mac people have come to love and depend on… PC users get none of those luxuries, particularly in business because those can all be “management hassles” and “unnecessary features”.
You never know exactly what to blame when it comes to the PC world. There are numerous things that contribute to poor display and you never really know which combination is in effect on the particular machine you’re using to view your site. It’s a crap shoot. That’s why I just do not get my undies in a bundle when someone says, “Oh my god everything looks like crap in IE!” It’s most likely just that machine or those machines at that company.
Window wisdom for the day :)
Hi all,
Thanks Suzanne for the plist “how to”. But I like to point out another not so hidden feature in iWeb 2.xx which enables to use whatever fancy font you like.
-Go to the preferences i iWeb and check the box where it says something like “show textboxes that will be converted to graphics” (I’m not at my mac right now)
-Next grab one of this text boxes in your iweb page (most likely a heading)
-If it is in the header part of the document you have to hold down the Apple key at the same time and alt- if you wont to copy it rather than drag the original.
-Change the font, size, style or whatever at your leisure
-When published Iweb will now make a graphic of your text.
-Now you will see the original font on a PC, in Firefox or whatever, regardless of the original font you choose.
-Works great, even if you cant chang font size manually when you view the page in your web browse.
-I use it for making menues with the same font as well. Just remember that you have to mark the box, not the text in the box, when you create the link.
Well let’s clarify a couple of things here… You’re implying that by turning on the option in the preferences (show text imaging indicator), the conversion to an image will now happen and that’s not true. The option in the preferences is not the switch that controls whether text gets converted to an image. It’s just an indicator symbol that appears if the font you used is configured in the plist to be converted to an image.
The conversion happens becuase the setting in the PLIST file tells it to. For each font listed in the PLIST, there are two lines that control whether that font will be converted to an image or not. They are:
<key>Image</key>
<true/>
A value of true means that font will be converted to an image. A value of false means it will remain as text and the font used on computers that do not have that font installed will default to the font family specified in the published CSS, generally “serif” or “sans serif”.
So let’s put that all together now. If you have the option “show text imaging indicator” enabled in your preferences and you use a font, specified in the PLIST file FontMapping.plist, that has an Image value of “true”, and if you use that font on your iWeb pages, you will see the text imaging indicator in the upper right corner of the text box as shown here.
Again, that option in preferences does NOT dictate whether fonts get turned to images. It only “indicates” when a font will be converted. The conversion rule is stored in the plist file and can only be controlled from there.
Suzanne,
I beg to differ, it works for me.
Look at this dummy:
http://www.tongang.se/Bulstrode/Bulstrode/Om_Bulstrode.html
It’s in Swedish but never mind.
I used the font JSL ancient which is a most uncommon font bases on a 17th century typeface. I followed the workflow described earlier and I can see the font displayed – as graphic – in IE on my PC (which definitley does not have this font installed)
JLS is btw not listed in my Iweb plist….
JSL is not listed in the plist file Jan – any font that has no entry will automatically be converted to an image if it doesn’t fit the generic font families – neither you nor iWeb has any control over it at that point. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the option in the preferences. Your “workflow” is NOT the reason that font is converted to an image at all.
Thank you very much for this – I have followed it on the edge of my understanding but your clear unhurried explanation has got me there!
I use a font that is not in the plist [papyrus] which will be converted to an image. Does that mean that my site will download more slowly on a PC than if I used a Windows known font?
Well, technically yes, it will download more slowly on any machine, Mac or PC because the text will be an image, not text.
One thing you can do Mark is add Papyrus to your FontMapping.plist file. You can duplicate an entry that already exists and change the “key” (font name) to Papyrus.
I would suggest you duplicate the entry for Copperplate. Copperplate is already set up with values that would work nicely for Papyrus. It uses the generic family, Fantasy, and substitues Trebuchet MS for windows machines. It’s also set NOT to generate images so you’ll always get text. Here’s how your finished entry would look:
<key>Papyrus</key>
<dict>
<key>Generic</key>
<string>fantasy</string>
<key>Image</key>
<false/>
<key>Windows</key>
<string>Trebuchet MS</string>
</dict>
You can, of course, specify any font you wish. You do not need to specify Trebuchet MS, but you need to pick a font that you know will be on every windows machine. Trebuchet is a great choice if the font you’re using is Papyrus though. Not to mention, Trebuchet renders very nicely – better than Arial when you’re talking about block text at small font sizes.
Great – thank you for that Suzanne,
However I called at my local Public Library today and looked for the first time to see what the type-face looked like on a PC.
It didn’t seem to be a graphic – it was very similar to the Papyrus that I used but blocky and the capital letters dropped below the base line of the text.
Does this imply that the Library’s machines have a version of Papyrus on them? If so this is hopeful because they are bog standard machines without anything fancy on them – not even IE 7 or QuickTime – so perhaps it is a common Windows font.
I will check with a Windows user and try to get a screen-shot to see what’s going on on another machine before I make the alteration to the FontMapping.plist file that you suggest.
Did jwalther420 ever get back to you on the updating question? [above 3 weeks ago]