September 3, 2001: Brian pointed me to this slightly absurd but way cool hack for identifying installed fonts. Basically, it writes a bit of text in courier and then in the face you're detecting for and compares the width. If they're different, the face is present. The script was written pre-mozilla, though, so it'd have to be updated to work for W3C DOM browsers, but that shouldn't be too hard. Of course, this begs the question of why no one's thought to expose the system's installed fonts to the DOM yet.