1 Great Developments

I know that @font-face has been around since IE4 but the recent developments have been great and I can’t wait to see what the future of web fonts brings.

It not only changes the way that I design but the way that I code. Now that I’m needing text-replacement less and less, my sites are more quick; something that is incredibly important now that Google are basing rankings on site speed (to a certain extent).

posted at 09:59 am on June 8, 2010 by traxor

2 Someday...

I feels like I read at least one article per week about new developments in web fonts. Every time I see an article I think to myself great, finally a solution to the age old web font problem, yet after every article I come away with the same, empty feeling. While all the articles I’ve read about the progress of fonts on the web all discuss various thoughts about how things will eventually change, so far the end result is still hacky workarounds and mixed ‘standards’. sIFR, cufon, @font-face, and on and on and on and I’m still left with no single good solution. If I want to display an image on the web, I can easily post a gif, jpg, or png. They work. No kludgy workarounds needed (IE/png yeah yeah). I don’t mind discussing the progress of fonts on the web, in fact it’s vital for progress to be made, but can we stop rehashing the same argument about what currently works and doesn’t work and how ‘someday’ things will be better? Let’s focus our energy on advocating a real solution, one that will benefit font and web designers. Why it’s taken over a decade and a half to get fonts right is beyond me.

posted at 11:49 am on June 8, 2010 by catchmyfame

3 My honest and somehow hostile opinion

I think we already have great solutions for webfonts. Despite rendering issues, that will soon be covered by Microsoft on Windows, and despite the time taken to users upgrade, I feel comfortable about the WOFF solution (and I’ll be even more pleased with the advanced OTF capabilities).

I can’t though be more unsatisfied with the overprotecting rules pushed by font foundries. It seems like they’re trying to cover they fear of not controlling their product by fooling customers with confusing EULAs and abusing fees. They advertise themselves as underpaid geniuses and ending treating customers as thieves. It’s clear to me, by observing fair distributors like FontSpring and exljbris, that there’s something wrong with the “traditional” and bigger foundries business model.

What I can say by myself is that I won’t bite. I’ll continue to buy fonts from small foundries and hope that someday the bigger ones will eventually see the money they lost by treating web professionals with such ignorance.

I also wanted to say that I really admire font designers, their passion and their product. I understand that they are trying to figure how to distribute their work. Maybe they should take some lessons from small and successful software companies.

I feel optimistic about this empty feeling – as catchmyfame described – going away.

posted at 12:53 pm on June 8, 2010 by victornogueira

4 Fontdeck and from nothing to something in 18 month

First off, I’d be remiss not mention Fontdeck as another font service to add to the mix. Plug over.

Secondly, I think it’s worth taking a step back and thinking how far webfonts have come in a matter of about 18 months. catchmyfame may say it’s taken over a decade and a half to get fonts right but the reality is that it’s taken only year and a half. Webfonts only really became a viable possibility once Safari and in particular Firefox supported them as well. Until that happened we could only use EOT on IE and that simply wasn’t good enough.

What has happened in a matter of months is the opening up of a whole new marketplace – nothing unusual there; it’s what the Web is good at. But what also happened was a complete turnaround of an industry – font ‘foundries’ and designers went from ignoring the web as a marketplace to embracing it. Maybe not all whole heartedly, and certainly not all immediately, but nonetheless I think the font design community (for that’s what it is) deserves some kudos for this, and should be cut some slack. Any comparisons with the music industry should be dismissed as hokum.

posted at 03:20 pm on June 8, 2010 by Richard Rutter

5 IE8 does support CFF/PostScript

A correction: IE8 can, in fact, render EOT with CFF/PostScript outlines (unlike previous versions). For a while, the trick was actually getting such an EOT built, since WEFT doesn’t support CFF/PS. Today, there are some options for getting such an EOT built. Of course it will look pretty bad, since IE8 still uses GDI, which doesn’t do a good job with CFF/PS fonts.

posted at 04:39 pm on June 8, 2010 by Christopher Slye

7 Why does iPhone/iPad/iTouch only supports SVG @fon

I asked this one over on typophile.com earlier today, but did not get any bites. Does anyone here know why iPhone/iPad/iTouch only supports SVG font-face implementation, and not TTF (or WOFF)? Seems strange to me since Safari supports TTF from version 3.1 and later. Richard referred to SVG here as a "a much simpler and elegant font-face alternative to font rendering” and “a major font format going forward”. Please elaborate. Might help to explain why Apple is not supporting TTF for Mobile Safari.

posted at 08:06 pm on June 8, 2010 by Chris Roberts

8 I'm just glad to have a working solution

I’ve been trying all sort of hacks, scripts and what not to add custom fonts to my websites for a long time.

The solutions described in “Making it work today” are the first that actually worked. I didn’t think I would see a custom font render on IE6 in Windows XP. And by custom I mean any font that doesn’t come with a standard installation of Windows, Mac and most Linux distributions.

It’s not perfect, but to me it’s fine for now.

posted at 05:36 am on June 9, 2010 by Radu.Tanasescu

9 Small niggle

As PNG and JPEG are to image formats like BMP and TIFF, WOFF is to TTF and OTF.

I think this is a bit misleading. A jpeg is a file format and a compression method. Tiffs can use jpeg compression (or zip, or LZW). PNG isn’t just zipped BMP either.

Otherwise, very interesting article :)

posted at 11:22 am on June 9, 2010 by skilldrick