Aug 19 2010

Any Font, Any Time – Life with Web Open Font Format, or WOFF

In CNET News, Stephen Shankland wrote this great article on the future on accessing your favorite font on the web, check it out:

Your favorite font could soon be coming to the Web.

That's because of a new technology called Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, that has attracted support from all the right players: browser makers, standards groups, typography designers, and online services to ease licensing. The technology, just now ready enough to use, is making something of a debut this week at the TypeCon conference in Los Angeles.

Your favorite font could soon be coming to the Web.

That's because of a new technology called Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, that has attracted support from all the right players: browser makers, standards groups, typography designers, and online services to ease licensing. The technology, just now ready enough to use, is making something of a debut this week at the TypeCon conference in Los Angeles.

WOFF can let designers impart an old style to text with an appropriate font. WOFF can let designers impart an old style to text with an appropriate font. In this Mozilla demonstration, it's used to reproduce an excerpt from law from 1700 in a book of laws from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

(Credit: John Daggett)

WOFF grew out of cooperation among Erik van Blokland from type foundry LettError, Tal Leming from type foundry Type Supply, and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla. It's steadily accumulated allies, and some final pieces have now fallen into place:

• Browser support. Apple has added support in prototype builds of WebKit, the browser engine used by Safari. The four other major browsers already had signed up for WOFF.

• Adobe support. The design powerhouse said Monday it will offer several Adobe fonts for Web use through a font subscription service called TypeKit.

• Standardization. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first draft of WOFF on July 27, clearing the way for its use in browsers and elsewhere.

Individually, these moves would be minor. But together, they promise to help open the Web to typography, catching the new medium up with books, newspapers, magazines, TV, and the rest of the world where words can embody more than just raw textual information.

Continue reading

  • Share/Bookmark

Feb 5 2010

Web Design and Font Stacks

I was reading my daily round up of design and tutorial blogs today and came across this great article on web typography. With so many fonts out there to use, why use the same "safe" ones all the time in your design? There are countless others that come standard on both the PC and the Mac.

Here is a run down from author Amrinder Sandhu from his article Revised Font Stack. The font stacks and stats for both serif and sans serif are after the more jump.

Revised Font Stacks

* Some of the fonts, like: Garamond, Baskerville and Didot are not as readable on screen as Georgia. Feel free to make your own selection.
* Due to smaller x-height; Caslon, Didot, Garamond, Baskerville and Hoefler Text should be set at minimum of 14 pixels or above.
* Lucida Grande, Futura and Tahoma are mechanically obliqued to fake an italic.
* Geneva, Baskerville Old Face and Big Caslon has no bold and italic. They are faked to bold and italic.
* Avoid using Helvetica or Helvetica Neue for body text, especially below 14px.
* Futura, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic Medium should be carefully stacked and used because of their unusual weight.

Continue reading

  • Share/Bookmark