Hello,
I have a font installed (legit).
I use it for a specific project and it is installed. I can see it and use it with all my other software.
It doesn’t show up in the Sparkle font list.
I can’t add it since it doesn’t see it.
Ok. I think I understand the issue. If you have the font downloaded to your computer, from the font panel in Sparkle, click the Custom Web fonts tab, and then click on the Open button.
Browse for the folder containing your font and select it (the folder), then click the Open button at the bottom of the finder window.
This should add the font family to Sparkle’s list of fonts, and should show up in the font list in the interface whenever you choose a font in the style panel.
This to keep Sparkle’s font list manageable. Some people have thousands of fonts installed on their system, but you don’t always need access to them all in a website builder. Therefore, it’s best to limit the fonts used in your website app to just those you may really need.
In website terms, System fonts are those fonts that are readily available on most user systems or devices. When these fonts are used, Sparkle doesn’t actually create a font file - it simply references the font name. If a user of your website has that named font installed, that’s the font that will be displayed. If they don’t have it installed, a fallback font will be displayed instead. Just because a font is installed on your system, it isn’t necessarily a generic ‘system font’
When you choose a custom webfont, you can select any font installed on your computer and have Sparkle install it as a web font that gets sent to to your server as part of the website, This makes the font available to users whether they have it installed or not.
Just to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, I’d add that most system fonts will not work at all in the browser. This is because many ad services used the list of installed fonts as a way to identify a particular browser on the web, and profile it (related to so called “super cookies”).
So at some point 5 years ago we removed fonts that browsers won’t recognize from the list, as documented in this post:
The other aspect of random fonts installed in your system, is that most of the time the visiting browser will not have that font, so that font will be replaced with something else. While in some cases they will be replaced by something reasonably similar (say a plain serif or san serif font), often times it will not.
So in most cases what’s best is to install the font as a custom web font, and use it as a web font.