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Decorating Your Blog With Special Fonts

One of the neatest ways to theme decorate a website is by adding a relevant font.

There are music fonts, which look good on musical websites. And classical fonts which look good on classical and literary websites. And everybody knows "technological / computer style" fonts, which can decorate computer / Internet relevant websites.

You can change the font for your blog, using the Template Designer "Advanced" submenu, which will let you choose from a dozen or so commonly installed fonts.

Special fonts work best for specialised websites, where the majority of the readers are expected to have installed the fonts in question on their computers. Fonts are essentially code, which transforms numbers and letters coded in ASCII, in your blog, into pixels on the computer screens used by your readers. There are thousands of different fonts, available all over the Internet - and not one computer will have all fonts installed.

Look at the code in your blog template.

Here's a snippet from this blog.
<Group description="Page Text" selector=".content-inner">
<Variable name="body.font" description="Font" type="font"
default="normal normal 12px Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" value="normal normal 12px Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"/>
<Variable name="body.text.color" description="Text Color" type="color" default="#222222" value="#000000"/>
</Group>

My current preference is that this blog display post text in the Arial font. As s second choice, Tahoma, which is similar to Arial. Then, in decreasing preference, Helvetica, FreeSans, and any sans-serif font installed on the computer, that's displaying this blog.

If I had a custom font, I might have the definition
value="normal normal 12px MyCustomFont, Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"
For every computer with MyCustomFont installed, this blog would look way cool.

Note how simple "MyCustomFont" was to add. If I was to add "My Custom Font", I'd add it as
value="normal normal 12px 'My Custom Font', Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"

Regardless of the specific font, how many of my readers could I realistically expect to have MyCustomFont - or 'My Custom Font' - installed on their computers?

Unless your blog has a very limited and predictable reader population, you're really better off designing your blog around more common fonts, and finding other ways to decorate your blog. Don't depend upon custom fonts, by themselves, to do a lot for you.

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