@font-face

One of our most widely-request features is to add support for the CSS @font-face property. This property allows you to specify a true type font file that includes a specific font you want to use to render a web page. This is important not only for designers to get more consistent formatting and layout, but is also important to web developers for non-english websites who often have users that may or may not have access to high-quality fonts. Beta 1 includes support for @font-face.

Right now the fonts must be located at the same origin as the page that includes it.

@font-face support is implemented for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux. Linux support is underway and will be done by Firefox 3.1 final.

“If you use @, they will come…”

In fact, mid-2008, I think a few browsers are already over it, and supporting technology in communications, corporations be damned.

The revolution will not be Profitablized.~

(Profitablized is a trademark of the bastards that made “Profitablized” remotely amusing. Oh, wait, thats not so funny.insert tilde after period, guess connotation.

For those worried about intellectual property - don’t be. This is a technical implementation, to allow better design on the web - it’s not meant to be a way for somebody to illegally share your font. If you were a photographer (as I also happen to be) instead of a typographer, somebody could still digitally download your picture (as a JPEG, or whatever format it happens to be in) from a site that has been allowed to use it by yourself, and then upload it to their server and link it to people if they felt like distributing it without permission. It’s not the <img> tag’s fault. The same applies to fonts - I could easily upload a font file I don’t have the rights to use to my own server, and then distribute it… this has nothing to do with the CSS @font-face feature in and of itself. Now, of course, common implementation of @font-face will cause there to be many, many, many more people uploading fonts they legally bought to their server, without knowing any better than to do so - even though such is illegal. I understand reservations because of that, but it’s important to set them aside and move on. Sure, photographers might be a bit happier if there was no <img> tag, right? General people would be much less likely to ’steal’ their image and post it on a forum or their little blog or something, not knowing any better than to do so. But did we not implement <img> because of this? No, we have <img>, and it’s a central part of the web designer’s arsenal. @font-face should, and will, be the same - if we let it. And we should.

Also, to pimp somebody I see as a great corner-stone of the @font-face movement… you all should check out Jos Buivenga. His work is not only absolutely stunning and free, but also (after an extended e-mail exchange with him by yours truly) released for use on the web with @font-face! I believe his are some of the first typefaces to be specifically so released, and I really hope to see them widely used as CSS @font-face gains better support. Of course, the terms are a bit more restrictive than I’d like (have to link to the font’s page from the footer of any page you use the font on), but hell - it’s better than absolutely anything else out there (except the bitstream vera fonts, of course, as they’re totally open source), so I can’t raise any complaints!

To others considering releasing their already-free fonts use for @font-face use - here’s my suggestion for use terms. If you want yourself credited, consider requiring your name and the URL to the font or your site be included in the CSS file, proximal to the @font-face declaration itself. My argument is this - anybody who wants to ’steal’, or (if it’s legal) ‘retrieve’ a font they like from a site they’re visiting, they aren’t going to go digging in their browser cache (do you do so when you see an image you like on a site?). They’re going to view the page source, copy the link to the CSS file, and open it separately, thus obtaining the link the browser is using to grab the typeface before rendering. If your information is right above the @font-face declaration in that file, 99% of people interested in the font will be redirected to your page! This is much more reasonable, in my opinion, than requiring a link on the page itself. I don’t even include a link to myself on most of my pages, it’s far too much clutter. Maybe some people like fat footers, but most designers (and these are the ones that will be using your typeface, in all likely hood) will be put off by the bloat required for a return link.

tl;dr @font-face is AWESOME!

Between OpenType, TrueType, PostScript Type1,2 and 3, MM, AAX, Metafont and SVGFont, there are a lot of potential formats out there today, as well. And all but one are proprietary, which complicates things. To be practical and idealistic I’d pick OT and whatever more typographically-mature Free solution grows from SVGFont, if any.

Caching and sandboxing the font data is a relatively simple task. However, it would be a lot more work than one might first imagine to create an internal (not os’s resources-dependent) system that would do everything required to place the glyphs (visual representations of the letters) in the right way, respecting the font’s security flags, scaling tables, kernings (individuals, classes and tables!), substitutions, contextual alternates, and all those other modern font goodies. Those things are usually still done for other applications (even when they use their “own” fonts), in part by the OS.

Choz Cunningham
!Exclamachine Type Foundry

I don’t think there’s an IP issue. Fonts could be stored in the browser cache and not installed generally to the system — this method has worked for everything else copyrighted on the web.

Eventually it will happen, but when, I have no idea. I bet support could be hijacked into existing browsers via plugins you only need to install one time (like the Flash player).