Of course, your operating system comes with hundreds of fonts already, but can’t seem to find the right one? There are really only a few places on the net that offer a good variety of fonts, and the major players on the market are Buyfonts.com, (International Typeface Corporation), and . All offer many different specialty fonts and collections.

Why would you want a special font? Remember, fonts are not always text. While there are man many different text fonts, there are also many others, such as symbols, images, signs, animals, and more.

Be careful though! Just because you have a custom font on your design computer does not mean the person viewing your web page will be able to see it the way you intended them too. If the person viewing your web site doesn’t have the custom font you used for your website, their web browser will substitute another one on the fly. Your best bet is to use a web safe font for most of the text, then put any custom text in an image format. For example, the line of text below says “image editing software” using the Verdana font.

image editing software

The line below says “image editing software” using the lunasol font. If they both look the same, you probably don’t have the lunasol font, and your web browser substituted the font to one your computer knows about.

image editing software

The next line shows an example of the same line of text as a transparent gif, using the same lunasol font. This time you are viewing an image though, and your browser will just display the image rather than changing the font.

I simply created a transparent gif using Xara3D, set the background color the same as the web page background, and exported the gif, then inserted the image into the page.

I can even animate it:-)