David Emery Online

Web fonts — where are we?

20 July 2009

With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.

A very useful writeup of the current state of using embedded fonts in web pages. The webfont proposal sounds interesting to me, although I don’t really see what it’s adding on a practical note as it looks straight forward enough to tamper with the metadata. On a pragmatic note though; if that’s what the foundries want we should give it to them, so hopefully we can start making some progress.

I wonder if they’ve considered watermarking as an alternate solution – I imagine that with the kind of data that makes up a OpenType font file it would be fairly easy to embed enough information – without visibly altering the font – to make tracing who has a licence for that particular file (and what sites it’s licensed for) simple. Most of the benefits of .webfont, without having to implement a new format.

Also, it’s interesting they mention that EOT is as good as dead, while simultaneously hyping up TypeKit – I’m fairly sure that they feed IE EOT versions of their fonts…