Fonts and the Web

Fonts and the Web

Over the years there have been various attempts to “embed” fonts into web pages using a variety of different technologies, however to date none have really caught on. Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2) introduced the @font-face property. This provides a mechanism for web designers to specify the desired fonts for their web pages, and for developers of web browsers to support enhanced font display options. One of the benefits of the @font-face property is that web pages can be designed to degrade nicely by allowing alternative fonts to be used if a desired font is not available.

Here are three current technologies that bring richer font choices to web pages:

Embedded OpenType (EOT)

Microsoft introduced support for Embedded OpenType (EOT) in Internet Explorer 4, and produced a tool named WEFT to allow web designers to embed a TrueType font into a web page. Unfortunately the EOT mechanism is only supported in Windows version on Internet Explorer and not on other browsers or platforms. Recently Microsoft and Monotype Imaging (who developed the MicroType® Express compression format used by EOT to reduce file size) submitted an EOT specification to the W3C for standardization. The submission can be found on the W3C web site: EOT file format specification.

EOT offers several advantages for type designers, and web designers. For type designers EOT creation tools must respect the embedding permissions built-into their fonts, and EOTs are bound to a specific web page or site. For web designers an EOT can contain a subset of the glyphs, and it can be compressed – both of these features can shrink EOT file sizes to reduce download times and improve performance.

FREE - Make an EOT file!

Ascender is pleased to introduce a online tool to create an EOT font for use on your website. Check out this new utility here.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

This was developed by Shaun Inman using JavaScript and Flash for headlines. sIFR uses CSS to display headline type as Flash graphics. If Flash or JavaScript are not present the text is rendered as standard HTML. Unlike EOT files, sIFR was not envisioned to handle text at body copy sizes and it does not utilize the font embedding permissions in a TrueType or OpenType font. More info on sIFR.

Font Linking

One of the features in CSS2 is the ability to link directly to a raw font file and download it from a server to a computer using the @font-face mechanism. Recently Apple’s Safari 3.1 web browser introduced support for this feature in versions for both Mac OS X and Windows. Font Linking is also referred to by some as “web fonts”. As the font is not embedded within, or tied to, a specific document or web page, Font Linking falls outside the realm of Document Font Embedding. Embedding permissions encoded within fonts have no bearing on Font Linking.

Most commercial fonts cannot be posted to a web server for use with Font Linking. There are free fonts that can be used with Font Linking, but a vast majority of free or shareware fonts failed to meet basic character set or other TrueType font standards. Ascender Corp. released a study of web fonts that in May, 2006 that analyzed over 4500 free TrueType fonts and found significant deficiencies that would preclude their use by serious web designers. View the Web Fonts Study

Web Font Embedding - What’s Next?

Ascender believes that although not perfect, EOT represents the best current solution for type designers and font foundries to protect their Intellectual Property. It is the only web font embedding solution that respects font embedding permissions, uses an industry-proven subsetting and compression mechanism, and ties embedded fonts to specific web sites. Ascender hopes that other web browsers will make it a priority to support EOT once it becomes a W3C standard.