Want to get away from ‘Web Safe’ fonts for some attractive headers AND do it without using an image? Use CSS3 font Embedding and embed a font-face!

NOTE: This article uses font file stored online and your browser may run slow or attempt to crash… sorry!

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@font-face is not strictly speaking ‘CSS3?; it was originally born in CSS 2 and although not appearing in CSS 2.1, CSS 3 is attempting to bring it into the standards.

In order to use a font, we first must call it using the ‘@font-face’ attribute and this must be done for each individual font we wish to use. Although I’m sure you have a few, you can download some fonts to experiment with here, at dafont.com.

CSS 3 Embedded Font Face

HELLO CSS 3 WORLD!

The above header uses the SketchRockwell font with the following CSS 3 applied to it.

CSS 3 Font Embed (Example I)

@font-face {
     font-family: ‘SoftSugarplainRegular’;
     src: url(‘fonts/Softplain-webfont.ttf’);
}

.fontface {
     font: 40px ‘SoftSugarplainRegular’, Arial, sans-serif;;
     letter-spacing: 0;
     text-align:center;
}

CSS3 can render type using several font formats: “truetype” (ttf),
“opentype” (otf), “embedded-opentype” (eot) and
“scalable-vector-graphic” (svg,svgz).

HELLO CSS 3 WORLD!

We can also apply additional effects such as a Text Shadow.

CSS 3 Font Embed (Example II)

	@font-face {
	  font-family: 'SoftSugarplainRegular';
	  src: url('fonts/Softplain-webfont.ttf');
	}
	.fontface1 {
	  font: 40px 'SoftSugarplainRegular', Arial, sans-serif;
	  letter-spacing: 0;
	  text-align:center;
	  text-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #111;
	}

NOTE:For some reason, using both @font-face and text-shadow will cause problems in Google Chrome. The reason IE has been given a ‘?’ next to it for the @font-face attribute, is because it will work using the popular .eot font file…

An example for those on alternative browsers, not seeing the embedded font..

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