/mike

Today I wanted to spruce up a site design with a nicer typeface. I also wanted to stay away from image replacement techniques and sIFR, which makes the job that much harder. Obviously the major problem is what typeface can I use that will be constant on both Windows and Mac — the majority audience is on Windows so I can’t even make a case for degradation or alternates. The solution, Myriad Pro.

Myriad Pro, created and licensed by Adobe, has been on default Mac OS installs for years. After some searching around the internets — read: Wikipedia — I found that Myriad Pro has been bundled with Adobe Reader since version 7. Perfect right? No. Not perfect at all.

After installing Adobe Reader on my vanilla Windows Vista test system, I was still unable to view Myriad Pro on a web page by using the following CSS declaration:

#container h2 { font-family: "Myriad", "Myriad Pro", "MyriadPro", "MyriadPro-Regular", sans-serif; }

Adding in other variations of the name didn’t help. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer would only show the default sans-serif typeface for the headline. I searched for a solution on Google. I even searched for a solution on Live Search. I pinged a few friends. Nobody seemed to have an answer, it should just work.

So I twittered this. Unfortunately there were no new ideas. Needless to say, this frustrated and confused me even more.

I found it weird that Adobe put the Myriad typeface into a different location than the rest of the system fonts but didn’t know how to deduce if that was the problem. Adobe installs Myriad Pro into: Z:\Library\Fonts. As I later found out, this is the problem.

It turns out that software developers can install fonts almost wherever they want, to allow the font to be used by the software being installed. The problem is, the rest of the system cannot access that font, unless it’s put into C:\Windows\Fonts. GAAAHH!!

Seriously Adobe?! Just make the damn font available to the rest of the system. What have you got to lose? Oh darn, people will have more choices for web typography? Heavens to merkatroids, that would be catastrophic wouldn’t it.

Adobe, you suck. Still.