Arial Narrow Font Issue?

[JD]

Hi! I don't know if you guys can help me with this or not...

I am currently using Arial Narrow font on my forum and, while this works on my own laptop in Google Chrome, it will not work on my boyfriend's computer under the same browser. I haven't installed anything on my computer that I am aware of that would allow me to view the font but I just wondered if anyone knew how to make it work properly or if there is another code that should not require any downloading for those viewing it that looks a lot like Arial Narrow.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with my boyfriend's computer or not but I find that my laptop displays a lot of fonts that don't work on other systems. Eg. I'll find that a font doesn't work on a work computer or something but has the correct font once I log on on my laptop. This includes sites that I'm just browsing and not a member of so I definitely haven't used any font downloads there...

Any suggestions? Many thanks!

[Chris]

An operating system (such as windows) will ship with a few pre-installed fonts. In addition programs that you installed in that operating system can also install their own special fonts, for example Office 2002 installs arial narrow font on your system. Other applications if they licensed the font could also install it if not already present.

If the font is not installed on the computer then the person viewing the text will instead see it in a font they do have. This has long been a problem on the web with several clumsy workarounds created to compensate. The latest and greatest solution is called web fonts which is a system now supported by all the modern browsers where the font is kept online so if someone doesn't have it installed it is downloaded to their computer so they can see the text in the font as intended (no longer dependent on the user having an certain version of operating system or a specific program installed to see the font). You can link these web fonts to your forum or use the Google Web Font plugin so that anyone lacking the font can get them installed automatically.

--tl;dr

[JD]

That worked perfectly Eton! I've checked it on several systems now and the Google fonts thing worked really well! Thanks!!