How FontsLive Works
What is FontsLive?
FontsLive is a subscription-based service that uses CSS @font-face and real fonts to format your pages. With FontsLive, fonts on your website are readable, re-sizeable, accessible, search engine friendly and compliant with W3C standards. All the FontsLive fonts are specifically licensed for web use and have been thoroughly tested to ensure optimal readability and legibility across all browsers and platforms.
Why choose FontsLive?
- Easy to use – Simply choose a font, update your website with the code we provide and your pages will appear just as you want them, completely text-based.
- High quality – Our font designers optimized the FontsLive fonts for legibility and readability on screen.
- Fast - FontsLive leverages the Windows® Azure™ cloud computing services platform to provide fast, reliable delivery of fonts throughout the world.
- Automatic updates – Whenever browsers change or update, FontsLive will automatically update your fonts for you.
- Legal – Most fonts are protected by copyright laws and cannot be used on the web. FontsLive brings you hundreds of high quality fonts from the leading type designers and foundries, specifically licensed for web use.
What is the Windows® Azure™ cloud computing services platform?
Windows Azure is a global content delivery network (CDN) that can instantly scale to handle high traffic demands with a 99.95% service level guarantee. With 20 data centers located around the world, Windows Azure allows FontsLive to deliver fonts quickly to your website visitors no matter what continent they are on. This approach enhances performance & reliability and also reduces the number of concurrent requests the browser makes to your server, helping to reduce latency.
For larger websites that need to control their font assets or use their own CDN, FontsLive offers a Self-Hosting option.
How easy is it to use custom fonts with CSS @font-face?
The FontsLive service generates a Resource file that you will paste into your web pages before </head> tag. Here is an example:
<link href="http://ascenderfonts.com/css/bd7bf3e-423e-b161-623799fd7266.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
This one line of code does all the heavy lifting, so you don’t have spend hours coding it to make sure the web fonts work properly in all the major browsers.
Next, we provide you with CSS samples for implementing the FontsLive service in your CSS files. The font-family property needs to match the web font you’ve assigned to your site. You can further edit your CSS based on the font style rules and classes as necessary for your particular site.
For example:
.titanium {
font-family: Titanium;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
}
In summary, you simply insert the Resource line of code and update your CSS rules including font-family, font-style and font-weight. Then publish your pages and see the web fonts in action! You can view the Quick Start Tutorial for more detailed instructions.