Web Fonts

Wednesday May 19th, 2010

Apparently there is a lot of progress in making it possible to use (display) different fonts in your web pages, so you can be sure that your page text render the same irrespective of the browser or underlying required installed fonts in the operating system.

For old stylers there has always been browser-safe fonts or even the generic font family names, though technically the fonts are different depending on  browser or operating system.

However the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) standard is progressing nicely and is aimed to solve this problem.

If you already want to play today, I've recently picked up two new different ways to allow you to use new fonts in the browser:

• Google Font Directory, which allow you to fairly easily use many new open source fonts in most dominant browsers (not all though).
• Cufón, which is a kind of replacement technique

Related links:

• Wikipedia article about Web Typography - introduces nicely to the problem.
• Microsoft throws its weight behind Web Open Font format, Ars Technica, April 20th.

PS. The problem of ensuring that your text is rendered correctly (the same) on any platform (in any browser or operating system) is actually not unlike the problem of being able to run your application (the same) on any platform (in any browser or operating system for that matter) albeit a small subset of it. It is interesting to notice that  companies can agree on standardizing the web fonts. Why not standardize the platform? I've described this in my Universal Desktop series of blogposts - see the first Universal Desktop #1.