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Caskets On Parade
Speciality Fonts use in this website
  Caskets On Parade  >  Specialty Font Usage FAQ

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) uses "tags" to control the appearance of the elements of a web page. One of those "tags," the FONT tag, is use to specify such things as the size of the text lettering, the color of the text lettering & the style of the text lettering (the character's "font").

This website employes all three text attribute elements. The size of the lettering and the color of the lettering may be achieved by your web browser program without any additional effort on your part. The style ("font") of the lettering may be a different matter. Examples of the first two considerations:

<FONT SIZE="-5">Tiny characters</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="-2">Small characters</FONT>

Your Browser's Default "Normal" sized characters

<FONT SIZE="+2">Medium characters</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="+5">Large characters</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="RED">RED characters</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="GREEN">GREEN characters</FONT>

<FONT COLOR="BLUE">BLUE characters</FONT>

Your web browser program has, by default, had specific fonts of a specific size selected to be used to display proportional & fixed-width text (these settings are user-changeable). If the designers of a web page wish to use an alternative style of text in their pages, the "FACE" attribute of the "FONT" HTML tag is used (provided that the named font is installed upon your machine). Examples might include:

Blah Blah Blah (no specification of font)

<FONT FACE="Arial">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Augsburger Initials">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Castellar">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Comic">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Courier">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Crillee">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Curlz">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Edda">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Elephant">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Garamond">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Goudy">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Kino MT">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Mistral">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Ransom">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

<FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Blah Blah Blah</FONT>

In a number of instances we've specified several distinctive fonts to be used if available. The names of those specialty fonts that are being used are:

  • Old English
  • Playbill
  • Postcrypt
    • Since the website has been developed on MS-DOS/Windows based machines we have specified font names that are typical of installations of those operating systems. Those fonts are specified under the TrueType standard; other platforms may employ similarly named fonts that produce the same displayed character style based upon the font technology in use by those operating systems.

    Old English
    We use this Gothic style font when we make reference to the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, other publications that use the font for their front page title, or several medieval Kings of Old England (we also use it, sporadically, on the displayed name of this contest — Caskets on Parade). The "Old English" font has been around computers for years.

    Playbill
    Playbill is the longtime font used by the New York theatrical publication of the same name. When the style of Playboy Magazine was established in the mid-1950s the Playbill font was used whenever the magazine's name appeared in print. We have continued that usage in this website.

    Postcrypt
    A number of death-related websites employ this font (notably, the Dead People Server). We have picked up on that trend & used it here too, usually to modify the display of words and phrases like Grim Reaper, Dead or Kills. Assuming that you do not already have the font installed on your machine, the style of the text would look like this — .

    Alternative Fonts
    The same general font style may be known by several different names, depending upon which version of an operating system you installed. In order to achieve the desired effect we will specify multiple fonts for each block of effected text (the browser goes through our list, looking for a font name that matches what we've declared).

    In the case of "Postcrypt" font usage we have specified several alternative font names: "Creepy," "Halloween" and "Chiller". For the Old English font we have used these alternatives: OldEnglish & Old English Text MT. So far we have not found a good alternative for the Playbill font.

    If you do not already have a "ghoulish" font installed on your machine or the others mentioned above you may grab a copy of them for download here (in Truetype format):

  • "Postcrypt"
  • "Old English
  • "Playbill


    • page last updated
    11/17/2008