Font Combobox

[MasterMax1313]

Chances are, there is no easy way to do this, though I figured I'd post here and see if anyone has a novel approach.

What I'd like to do is allow a user to choose a font for their page, through the use of a combobox, javascript, and possibly PHP.

My question, is there some way to popluate the combobox with fonts that either a) the system supports, or b) that might be built in somewhere?

If I can find a novel approach, perhaps this will wind up on the tutorials forum.

Let me know what you think!

 

[diabolo]

well here is the main thing with fonts, I am pretty sure that you can not embed fonts into your webpage, so then your range of fonts are limited.
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
instead you might want to try 'font-families' so that the browser can chose which font it has, also you will have to hardcode the box, rather than pulling the infomation from somewhere

 

[MasterMax1313]

I kind of figured that it is not possible to embed fonts into the website (though i wouldn't be surprised if there's some way to force a download of a font, as i think there are some security options in FF and IE that deal with font downloads). Anyway, the goal of this was to find out if there is a way to access a list of all installed fonts on a system (akin to C:/Windows/fonts), and I found out that there are some ways to do this with IE, but so far no luck with FF. The only solution I've come up with is writing a java applet and passing the data back to javascript to pop the combobox, or populating the combobox from the applet. I think you can use applets to access the file system, though it may have to be signed. At any rate this was more of an exploratory query, as I probably won't be able to add it to my site until version 2 or 3 (still have to get version 1 out )

 

[deadimp]

I think the only practical solution would be the common fonts listed on that site.
What you might want to do is find yourself on open source browser-based WYSIWYG editor and see how they created their font selector. That could probably give you some ideas, and even some code to use.

 

[papageno]

You can embed fonts located on your server, but it seems a bit complicated:

http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=web++embed++fonts&meta=