Font Embedding

The big problem with trying to pick the fonts you really like while not filling pages with bloated graphics is the fact that 99.9% of the people on the Internet will never have those typefaces on their Macs or PCs. We can’t solve this by giving copies of the fonts we use to everyone that visits our sites - we’d soon be in big trouble with the commercial font foundries. But there are two methods for doing virtually the same thing; Embedded OpenType, which is made by Microsoft and Adobe, and TrueDoc, by Netscape and Bitstream. Both methods allow a Web page to request specially encoded font data from the Web server. The Web browser then uses that to draw the typeface in all its glory.

Unfortunately neither technology works properly with all popular browsers. In addition the tool for producing Embedded OpenType is unfinished and not available for the Mac, although there are two commercial tools for creating TrueDoc encoded fonts. More worryingly, no major advances have been made for some time, and finally today's visual Web authoring tools don’t support embedded fonts, so layout work is a bit awkward. However if you’d like to try it out (and have a copy of a Windows emulator or a regular PC handy) you can download the tools and try producing your own embedded fonts. There’s a set of tutorials available at www.webmonkey.com which should help show what to do.
Information about the different tools can be found online: Microsoft’s WEFT is found at www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft2/default.htm. For TrueDoc production there’s the WebFont Maker from BitStream, at www.bitstream.com/webfont/index.html, and Typograph from HexWeb, at www.hexmac.com/products/typograph/index.html.

Before you try this, there is actually a more reliable way to embed fonts in Web pages. Macromedia’s Flash can store font outline data in Flash movies, so anyone with the Flash plugin correctly installed will be able to see things the way the designer intends. One drawback to this approach is that if the Flash plugin isn’t working for any reason the user won’t see anything. Insisting that people use a browser plugin just to see type on your pages is a bit steep, although if you use Flash for other forms of Web content in your site it would be more acceptable.

Unfortunately these tricks don’t really solve the issue of legibility of small type, so while they can help designers itching to use their favourite fonts in new and interesting ways, serious design still revolves around understanding and controlling font formatting.

The simplest way to get the typeface of your choice into pages is to make GIF text graphics. This is however inflexible, and doesn’t print well.

By using font embedding tricks you can have the actual font outlines used. The page now prints out well, but compatibility issues mean this still doesn’t work properly in all popular browsers.

By using Flash movies the page contents can be brought to life, and font outlines can be stored in the movie. Results can be very impressive, and recent Flash plugins allow printing, but without the right plugin nothing can be seen.