Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-5021029-20140902081336/@comment-11733175-20140902233437

Fonts work in two different ways. The first is to use a font already installed on the computer of the reader. These are typically limited to websafe fonts, ones that are almost guaranteed to be found everywhere such as Arial or Times New Roman. If you're using something that isn't a websafe font, but it relatively common, you might want to add a fallback for the font you want to use using the font-family CSS property. For example, Wikia have their font set to Helvetica. However, this isn't all that common so they've specified Arial as a fallback and then sans-serif as a fallback for that.

The other option is to store the font files on the website itself. This allows you to use the more unusual fonts in your site without having to worry about of the end user has it installed. Of course, it's best to prefer the installed version of the font (also known as the local version) if it exists and provide a fallback if for some reason the font file(s) won't load. or there's an error somewhere down the line.

If you do decide to use a non-websafe font there are 2 more options available. The first, and probably the easiest, is to import the font from another site. A common example of this is google fonts which allows you to use an @import statement to import the font files. It's worth noting that @import isn't the best option for importing CSS, but it's largely the only one available for wikis.

The second way is to upload the font files to the wiki. This has always been possible on wikis, but only recently have we realised we can do it - it simply never occurred to us that we could before. The most definitive guide I know of for setting everything up can be found at w:c:rs:MediaWiki:Common.css/Webfonts.css. As for enabling the file extensions, simply email staff and request the extensions you want and they'll quickly enable them for you - it's a simple process for them.

There also some examples of how to use font files uploaded to your wiki on that page too, it's fairly easy to copy them over to test how they work before uploading your own files.