Is it possible to use Gujarati Sangam MN on a website, and that all users regardless of their OS could see it as I do on a Macbook Pro, Lion?
MacBook Pro 13", Mac OS X (10.6.2)
Every single person with a computer would have to have that font activated on their system in order to see your text in that font. The only way around it is to save your text as a graphic and then insert that in the web page. Or, of course, use a common "web safe" font.
HBinswanger wrote:
Is it possible to use Gujarati Sangam MN on a website, and that all users regardless of their OS could see it as I do on a Macbook Pro, Lion?
No. Just specify that exact font and provide a suitable fallback.
Apple's licensed the font for iOS and iOS development and makes it available for that purpose, but it's not clear whether the font is public domain or permissively licensed - I suspect not. If you specify it as a font-family in CSS, it will be found on iOS devices. The OS X system font that's closest is Gujarati MT.
It is possible to put a typeface on a website and then use it in a web page (refer to any documentation of CSS3 and look for the @font-face rule), but if you do that you are essentially redistributing the typeface and you want to make sure that you have permission from the typeface designer to do that. You should presume that you can't.
Instead, the correct approach is to obtain a freely-distributable Gujurati typeface and use that. If you prefer the Gujarati Sangam MN typeface, in your CSS or HTML, specify that as the first option, then the freely distributable option as a fallback. The way CSS fonts work, is that you can declare fonts using @font-face to reference a font by URL (truetype, or eot font for older versions of Internet Explorer). Then, when you define a style in CSS, you can specfy any number of fonts for that style (including the ones you declared with @font-face), and the browser will use whatever the first matching font is that it can find.
iOS has the Gujarati Sangam MN font built it, so you need not provide it to users using iOS devices. OS X provides Gujarati MT, so if you include that in the list, then you don't need to provide it. I don't know what the most common Gujarati font for Windows and Android are, but if you add those to the list, then you should be covering 95% of the browsers out there without having to provide the font.
Thank you for this informative reply.
Am I on a wrong premise: I picked Gujarati because I liked it's look for English language text on the Macbook, but maybe it's oriented around Indian (Sanskrit?) characters and would show up as that on some systems.
What looks to be the identical font is Malayalam Sangam MN.
My second best preference of the Apple fonts was Geneva CY, or maybe Geeza Pro. Should I give up on Gujarati and try to use @fornt-face with one of these?
Thank you.
Both Malayalam and Geeza Pro are custom fonts with support for non-English languages. You should be able to use with with English too. I think @font-face would be the best approach. Just make sure to test it with the fallback fonts too.
Can I use Gujarati Sangam MN on a website?
