Web Open Font Format

While more and more people are joining the pool of web developers, it has become harder for developers to create websites that can stand out and many of them have resorted to using fancy fonts (non-system fonts) to create their webpages. The disadvantage of that method is that, if the client computer did not have the font, the web page would be displayed incorrectly.

Uploading the font family to the server for download by the client was expensive because it consumed space and bandwidth. This method also faced copyright issues. Other counter measures such as converting the fonts to images or using flash rendering, all of them were expensive and unreliable.

Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is an attempt to solve that problem by using an encoding tool that is more efficient than the TrueType Font or the OpenType Font. The WOFF is a compressed format meaning that the file size is significantly reduced and the developer can embed their fonts to their webpages much more efficiently.

Only disadvantage of WOFF so far is that it is not fully supported by all browsers yet. But development plans are on their way to make WOFF a standard for the WWW.

External Links:

1. Mozilla WOFF Discussion (http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/woff/)

2. IE WOFF Demo (http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/WebFonts/Default.html)

3. Another WOFF Demo (http://lostworldsfairs.com/)

Despite scouring numerous stylesheets for the past days, I couldn’t find any websites that used the WOFF for the sake of the website itself. I guess it’s because of their “under construction” nature. A google code search for woff inside css also returns mostly results from github.com indicating that WOFF is far from being widely used.

The 2 demos above (2 and 3) used WOFF to promote it and thus their usage clearly differs from the way a regular web developer would have used WOFF.

They should however provide a good glimpse of the possibilities for typography with the WOFF. There is one thing that the 2 websites make clear is that it is now easier to have webpages comparing typography because it is easier to display them all in 1 page without having to convert them into images.