Portable web font technology

Question

After reading the question on web font typeface selection, it occurred to me that portable network fonts were the answer. We used to use a package by Bitstream to generate subsets of needed fonts to embed in web pages so that it looked the same in every browser on every platform. When I Googled this, I found an RFC that looks like it's owned by Bitstream, and not much else.

What happened to this technology? Am I just not seeing it? Or did it disappear because it was proprietary? If so, what's on the horizon for this technology?

Answer 1

Most of web-based font embedding technologies died a painful death. For example, Microsoft's take on it was, guess what, IE-only, so other browsers couldn't render it. Naturally, web designers didn't want to go this way.

The new CSS standard has support for font embedding, IIRC. So far, no browser supports it.

If you want just headings done in your specific font, I would suggest pre-rendering them, using sIFR, or SVG (I use dynamically rendered SVG, but often my headings are 2Mb in size).

If you want the whole text done with your font, well, tough luck - there is no easy way of doing this at the moment. Though if you take into account that the majority of users still use IE =sigh= then you could try going with Microsoft's WEFT and see if it works for you. Bear in mind, though, that lots of fonts intended for print don't have the same quality of hinting that something like Georgia would have.

Good luck!

Answer 2

This link might be of interest to you: http://typeface.neocracy.org/

It's using javascript, so it'll only work where javascript is supported and enabled. But in most cases, this is a high percentage.

Answer 3

The Bitstream PFR technology was only supported in Netscape 4, which thankfully died a long time ago.

Microsoft's attempt at web fonts never met widespread acceptance due to:

• being IE-only;
• the inconvenience of converting to EOT;
• the awfulness of the WEFT tool in particular;
• the paucity of fonts that render well on screen, especially when ClearType may be unavailable/disabled;
• the paucity of fonts whose licences allowed you to embed them on the web.

There is a push to make TrueType/OpenType font files Just Work on the web, which may show up in Firefox 3.1, Opera 10 and Safari. There's some political debate regarding this, though, largely for copyright reasons. Personally I think at this point a little bit of rampant piracy might be what's needed to wake up font licensing from its current woeful default position of "you can't use our fonts for anything".

So in the meantime you can use EOT/WEFT for IE if you really can be bothered, but things may soon change.