Finally, True Web Fonts!
Simon 25th February 2010
One of the major players in the type industry, FontShop, has released licenses for real commercial fonts able to be used with CSS font embedding. For those unaware of CSS font embedding, the font is gathered using the @font-face construct rather than a regular selector. To embed the font files requires no use of Flash and no JavaScript. All you have to do is specify the font-family (typeface) name and its source file.
For Example:
@font-face {
font-family: "Helvetica";
src: url(/fonts/Helvetica.eot);
}
Read the Newsletter…
See the fonts…
Unfortunately FontShop says its formats don’t yet support Chrome, Safari or Opera and licensing fees aren’t dirt cheap, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Entry Filed under: web
3 Comments › Add your own
1. Nick Hawker 4 March 2010 9:45 am
Does this make it easier to take fonts off website for personal use ?
2. Simon 4 March 2010 9:56 am
Well, not for use outside the web browser. The two file formats they’re offering are Embedded OpenType (EOT, currently supported by Internet Explorer) and Web Open Font Format (WOFF, currently supported by Firefox). These are web only as far as I know.
Obviously there’s potential for piracy — that they can be poached to use on websites that haven’t paid for them — but that’s similar to current font files like OpenType, TrueType and PostScript.
3. Simon 8 September 2010 9:04 am
Good news everyone! It seems like the WOFF format is now the standard for displaying web fonts.
It is now fully supported by Mozilla Firefox 3.6+ and Google Chrome 6+ and will be supported by Internet Explorer 9.
Given that it is supported in the WebKit nightlies, it will likely be included in a future version of Safari.
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