Discuss: Web Fonts at the Crossing

by Richard Fink

11 @victornogueira and Richard Fink

I knew there was a reason I was holding off on buying that typeface I really liked from this big name distributor. (That kind of behavior is not usually in my nature) I reread that distributor’s confusing EULA and right away saw exactly what Richard was talking about. Went over to fontspring and found the exact same font for the same price (with an option to purchase @font-face for a little extra) with a lot less restrictions. Thank you both!

posted at 01:08 am on June 12, 2010 by jcgallaher

12 Making Web Fonts Simple

Hi Richard – a nice article, with some good info. As you summarized, “Yes it is confusing.” I think part of this has to do with the variety of different perspectives on this topic.

Like you and many other readers of this article, my company, Ascender Corp, is passionate about web fonts and the potential it has for all the stakeholders. We have invested a lot in developing various web fonts solutions and web sites. Our goal is to provide web designers & developers with the best quality fonts and the typographic tools they need to implement web fonts.

Unfortunately in your article you have glossed over some key points that add to the confusion.

Quality: this is one of the key challenges with web fonts today. Fonts may look good at large headline sizes but totally illegible at small text sizes. Fonts may not look the same in Mac and Windows. Fonts used in a Photoshop wireframe design mockup may not render same when viewed as web fonts in web browsers. Why is this? The simple answer is that web fonts are different from print fonts.

High quality web fonts need to be carefully designed, hinted and proofed. At Ascender we have chosen not to simply dump our collection of 10,000 print fonts onto the web. This would be a disservice to the market and would not further our collective goals of improving the typography and readability of websites. Instead we are investing a significant amount of time and resources in optimizing fonts for the web.

Our efforts are led by Tom Rickner, the renowned type designer and font developer who hinted the fonts we all use everyday (and many take for granted) in Macs, PCs and mobile phones: Georgia, Verdana, Segoe UI, Droid, Prelude and others. We have a very strict, high quality bar that we have set for the web fonts we offer today, and those in development. In summary, not all fonts are created equal and web designers will figure this out one way or another (hopefully by not “pulling a Boing-Boing” by trying to implement a poor quality free font).

Font Hosting Services: I think it is a bit disingenuous to add “obfuscation” and try to coin a new acronym to describe our approach to serving web fonts. Don’t we already have enough acronyms? EOT, WOFF, TTF, OTF, SVG, FOUT… :-)

One of the many benefits of web fonts hosting services is that they simplify the process and cut through the confusion. Making web fonts simple has tremendous value to web sites of all shapes and sizes. The service we offer at our FontsLive site, and the service we are developing with the Font Bureau at Webtype.com will provide significant value to both those who want to host their own fonts and those looking for an easy way to plug in web fonts without all the hassles that you’ve pointed out.

What I take issue with is your comment that Ascender’s web font delivery system has “a clever but hacky DRM-like structure”. We went out of our way to avoid DRM, and built our system following web standards without “hacks”.

Best of all, our web fonts system works for both our customers who use our hosting service and for those who host our web fonts on their servers. So yes, even a web font hosting service still has value to websites that want to host their own fonts. One of the benefits of FontsLive.com, and soon Webtype.com, is that we can generate all the web font files along with the CSS which customers will need, thus simplifying the process even for self-hosting websites.

The value we provide is not only high quality web fonts optimized for rendering on screen, but also an easy way to obtain and implement the web fonts. So I think your comment about web fonts hosting services being “a phase” may not prove to be true in the long term. Only time will tell. I look forward to ten years from now and looking back on 2010 as ‘the year of web fonts’ to see how it turned out for us all!

posted at 03:21 pm on June 12, 2010 by bill_davis

13 In response...

To: Bill Davis

>Our efforts are led by Tom Rickner
Who I’ve had the pleasure of spending the past few days with at the Future Of Reading Conference at Tom’s alma mater, RIT, in Rochester, NY. (Along with your colleague Steve Matteson, too.) Great people, and deeply committed to quality font design.
Quite true.

As for my choice of words, I stand behind them. But if, in the future – as user agents and business practices change – they no longer apply, I will happily say so loudly.
All I advocate is informed, smart decisions.

So what I would suggest is this: anyone reading these comments should go right ahead, try your service(s) under the free 30 day trial, and then, kindly report back on what problems, if any, they found and/or foresee. Including the pricing (based on bandwidth) and in light of the checklist.

Fair enough? That would be a win all around, I think.

posted at 03:26 am on June 13, 2010 by Richard Fink

14 Font Abuse

Great article –

I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time however, something tells me that millions of dreadful websites made with Comic Sans and Papyrus will be popping up everywhere.

posted at 03:20 pm on June 14, 2010 by Philip Vernon Hastings

15 Font Hosting could be a great business

But current implementations are either too legally restrictive or too technically complex to be worth our time…

posted at 07:45 pm on June 14, 2010 by Thiago Cavalcanti

16 clever yes - but NO DRM

@Richard,

> As for my choice of words, I stand behind them.

I think you missed my point that you make references to Typekit, but then say that Extensis, Ascender and Monotype use DRM or hacks.

Not true at all.

We went out of our way to design our FontsLive site making it as efficient as possible, and delivering W3C compliant web fonts. I can’t speak for the others, but I don’t think any of us appreciate being painted with a broad, tainted brush. -:)

posted at 10:16 pm on June 14, 2010 by bill_davis

17 eot (was potentially) > woff

Richard: The www needed this article. I feel, however, you omitted to say EOT has always been able to overcome the licensing problems with domain specific fonts.

Why doesn’t WOFF do this? It’s beyond me!

Why didn’t the community embrace and develop on EOT? Probably because the old eot generator from MS offended us so badly with lots of other things besides TTF and OTF to EOT conversion, muddying the process with unrelated, un-useful functions. But EOT still remains a zipped, DRM’d format.

posted at 10:59 am on June 16, 2010 by davidchoy

18 Performance and FOUT?

After reading this article, I got interested in trying out @font-face. The resulting performance made me think I must be doing something wrong: 7 to 11 seconds to load my page?! I began to look around for solutions but all I got was confirmation that this was ‘normal’ for font downloading. (See Steve Souder’s Tests) I must admit I am rather disappointed, but hopeful. Is there a solution to the performance issue?

posted at 04:14 pm on July 1, 2010 by BuckeyeInWI

19 Slow loading

RE: the guy who posted comment #18. Yep, tried that too. Some of these load times are just out of control.

Also tried Google fonts. Some are okay, buy on the whole they’re nothing much.

At this moment in time, I’ll stick to what’s already on user’s systems. Trebuchet, Arial, Georgia and Times. Just like ALA!

posted at 02:07 pm on July 4, 2010 by andrew-bkk

20 Reported attack site!

In listing point #3 in the initial roundup of the article there’s a link to EOTFAST. This website is reported as an attack site by Google. [url=“http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://eotfast.com/” target=”_blank”]See link for details[/url]

posted at 06:49 am on August 15, 2010 by arana