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What Happened?
And How Do I Change The Font To Something More Medieval Again?
| Old Menu: | New Menu - Before Better Menu Font: | New Menu - After Better Menu Font: |
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What Happened?
YOUR QUESTION:
The links in the navigation menu at the left of the Barony's web pages used to be rendered in a "pretty, medieval" font. Now they are displayed in a modern font (unless I've already installed the "pretty, medieval" font provided in the new menu). What gives?
MY ANSWER:
Well, those links used to be pictures of words, instead of actually being words. And that made it a pain*** if your Webminister was ever going to make any additions or changes to the web site that made changes to those links necessary. Certainly, new links could have been added without making them pictures, and old links could have been replaced with words, as needed. But that would have resulted in mis-matches and an ugly halfway-between state. And frankly, I think that "just not changing things and not getting any new functionality or links" is likely to have brought fewer gripes than getting updates in a visually-ugly way.
So I waited till I could make the changes all at once, and the pictures have now gone away, replaced by words, and now I've added some new links, too (without a lot of extra work). Some of the new links even point to things that have been available for a while now, but since there weren't links to them in the navigation menu, they weren't so easy to find as they are now. In fact, the point of the change is that it will be easy to make changes to the navigation menu from now on. It helps your Webministers help you! I hope I've convinced you by now that the change is a good thing from a practical stand-point.
The thing about words and the font used, though, is that there are very few fonts that exist on all types of computers/operating systems. And there aren't any "pretty, medieval" fonts that I can count on all of you, or even most of you, having. I can set words to display in any font I want, but if you don't have that font on your computer, you won't see anything in that font.
However, I can also set up a list of fonts that your PC will try, in order, until it finds one your computer will display. So I found a free "pretty, medieval" font, and chose to use that; it is the first font in my list. Behind that, I tried two more progressively generic, modern fonts. I made the "pretty, medieval" font available for you to download from our web site, so that we can always have it without worrying about whether some other web site goes away. As soon as you install that, the menu will be "pretty" again. Until then, it's links will display in Arial if your computer has a font with that name, or in whatever font your web browser has designated as its "San Serif" font. (Don't worry -- All web browsers do designate a font to be used as a "san serif" font; it is part of being a web browser, so to speak.) This is the best I can do to provide a uniform view of the web site to everyone. And that is why you probably see a modern font in the menus, all of a sudden.
***Explantion Of The Pain: Those links being words made it a fair bit of extra work for the Webminister to change them or add new links that looked the same. Just typing replacement words or new words is much, much simpler than "typing the words, then displaying them somewhere in the fancy font, then taking a picture of that, then making the background of that picture transparent, then storing and linking in the new picture"; and the pictures take up extra disk space (for relatively little benefit) on our server and your computers. Plus, your current Webminister could no longer find whatever font was being used when those pictures were originally created, so even if we were going to keep the same sytem, all the old picture-links would have to be recreated in addition to any new ones, or else we'd have mis-matched fonts.
How Can I Make The Navigation Menu's Links "Medieval And Pretty" Again?
Let me emphasize this point: The links work; you can use them to get around the site. This step is only necessary to change how they look. If you can't install a new font on the computer you're using -- like if it belongs to someone else, or you don't have permission to install new fonts -- do not worry about it. Now ...
At the bottom of the navigation menu, above the "details" link you followed to reach this page, there is a link reading "better menu font". Click on that to download a free "pretty, medieval" font from our web site. Save and install that font as appropriate for your computer system; most modern systems make it a very easy process. You're done. After that, any time you come to a new page with the new navigation menu, or refresh an old one, it will use that font. (And if you ever want to go back to the plain modern font, just uninstall the one you downloaded from here.
If you don't know how to install a font on your computer once you have it downloaded, don't worry too much. Like I said, most modern systems make it a very easy process. In most Windows systems (say from Windows 95 on), you can probably get somewhere useful just by double-clicking on the font file. You can either ask a tech-savvy friend to help, or just use a search engine like Google.com or Dogpile.com to search on something like "install font" followed by the name of your computer operating system to get useful results, probably detailed instructions.
In case you are wondering, or your computer whiz asks you, you can tell "what kind of font" you got from our site by looking at the end of the file name (after the period). If it ends in ".ttf", it is a true-type font, supported by pretty much every graphical operating system available at the time of this writing [11:55 PM 8/19/2010]. And that is the kind of font I made available when I wrote this page and made the initial sweeping changes to the navigation menu. Of course, a later Webminister might make new changes and set it up to use a different font, which they should also make available here. So that might be a different kind.