downloadable fonts : Java Glossary

The problem with specifying fonts in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), is your choices will not be honoured unless the user already has that font installed on his operating system/browser. You can ask him to make sure it is installed. If the font is free, you can provide a link to it, and ask him to download and install it, but almost for sure, he will ignore you. What you want is some automatic way of including a crucial font with your web page.

The modern W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) CSS scheme calls the downloadable fonts web fonts. The key is @font-face. You use it like this in your style sheet:

The following font formats may be supported: .eot, .pfb, .pfa, .ttf i.e. embedded-opentype, truetype, opentype, truetype-gx, speedo, Speedo, intellifont, woff. You may need to serve the font in several formats, e.g. ones suitable for Windows, Linux, Mac and the browser decides which one it likes best. For example:

• Internet Explorer only supports EOT
• Mozilla browsers support woff, OTF and TTF (TrueType Font)
• Safari and Opera support woff, OTF, TTF and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• Chrome supports woff, TTF and SVG

woff is the new W3C font standard. It is basically TrueType or PostScript compressed with a bit of metadata to support web fonts.

Disadvantages

• There is the overhead of downloading and installing, which may be repeated after the browser font-cache is flushed.
• Security Warnings: Depending on their individual browser settings, visitors may receive a security warning every time a page accesses an embedded font. Besides being disruptive, the warnings may scare visitors away from your site.
• The font downloaded can only be used for your webpages.
• Generally the only fonts you can use this way are free fonts. Any commercial licenced font typically prohibits you from using it on your website.
• Because it is so easy to reverse engineer most web font formats back to desktop formats, any commercial licensing will most likely prequire you to encode the fonts in some proprietary format with a proprietary driver installed on the clients.

Advantages

• Adobe Typekit and FontDeck now let you rent fonts on a yearly basis to use on your web pages. They are downloaded from their servers. They deal with the problem of blocking others from stealing the fonts.

Google Web Fonts

Google provides web fonts free. All you have to do is include stylesheets for the fonts you want for the page. You don’t even have to compose the style sheet. Google does it for you. You include a request for a font in your header like this (provided by the Google website.)

It is just an ordinary style sheet link. Google then transparently generates a corresponding style sheet for you like this and provides it directly to your clients:

The contents of the generated *.css seems to be stable, so I suspect it is safe to write your own style sheet with those contents, handling more than one font per style sheet, or incorporating that code in an existing style sheet.