Next Steps

Facing the (Font) Future

August 6, 2010 @ 4:14pm

Updated — August 16, 2010 @ 8:37am

by Jeff Byrnes

It seems as though the technology for representing fonts on the web are finally coming to fruition. With the W3C’s near-adoption of the WOFF format (it has remarked that “…it expects WOFF to soon become the ‘single, interoperable format’ supported by all browsers.”), @font-face seems poised to become the firm technology for embedding fonts in a site.

Previously, techniques like cufón & sIFR were the best way to deploy a font not commonly installed across all systems, or to guarantee a particular font is used. These required JavaScript alone at best, or a combination of JavaScript & Flash.

So with that, I give you the most bulletproof, known as the smiley variation, way to deploy @font-face to your site (courtesy of Paul Irish):

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Graublau Web';
    src: url('GraublauWeb.eot');
    src: local('☺'),
         url('GraublauWeb.otf') format('opentype');
}

It’s always good to know how it all works, so definitely head over to Paul Irish’s article, but you can use Font Squirrel’s @font-face generator to simplify your life.

Now, however, the biggest hurdle is the licensing. Since we are basically allowing for the downloading of the font files, things can get a bit sticky. Thankfully, many of the font foundries are coming around and crafting new licensing, and even creating web versions of their typefaces. At the very least, they’re joining forces with other JavaScript-based solutions like Typekit and Fontdeck. We’ll see how it all turns out.