@font-face in CSS....is it ok?

Question

On my website, my font family is Tw Cen MT, Gill Sans, Century Gothic, sans-serif. Obviouisly, not everyone is going to have Tw Cen MT, so I have chosen to try out the @font-face method.

Here is my css:

@font-face { font-family: Tw Cen MT; src: local("Tw Cen MT"),  url(fonts/TwCenMT.ttf) }

A few questions:

1. Will this work in all modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE8)?

2. I have not yet tested it because I have the font. Does this method work for you when you visit my homepage?

3. the font is a large file. Do you experience a long load time when visiting my site?

Thanks so much in advance

Answer 1

These dudes says it's ok as long as you surround the URL with "doublequotes" and end every line inside the font-face with a semicolon ;

Answer 2

It will technically work in the latest versions of all the browsers you mentioned, although there are some "gotchas", especially surrounding IE. Here is a link that goes into that in more detail.

The load time visiting your site was brief ( <1 sec ), but I'm not sure what font it actually pulled since I'm not familiar with all the fonts in your stack.

As far as I know, this is the canonical source for @font-face syntax, although I've had problems even with this.

In my experience, the short answer is that although @font-face is technically widely supported, in practice it can be tricky to get right.

Answer 3

Check out https://browserlab.adobe.com/ for testing it in different browsers. Or, http://litmusapp.com/browser-testing. Hope that helps.

Answer 4

From the non-technical perspective, are you sure your font license permits this? Most commercial font makers would be very, very upset at their fonts being provided unprotected for download on the internet like that.

Don't go getting yourself sued.