Microsoft's font embedding demos

January 31, 2000 11:27 PM

Microsoft's font embedding demos are really smurfin' cool. I think my favorite is the Hotzone Journal. IE4+ needed. Has anybody seen embedded fonts used elsewhere, or does anybody know if Mozilla does/will support font embedding?
posted by gleemax (5 comments total)

Actually, although I find the IE font embedding to be pretty cool, I think Netscape got it right by having Bitstream (a font company) handle their font rendering engine. Bitstream's TrueDoc fonts work in NN 4+, and in IE4+ with a plugin. There are several font burners available to make web-ready fonts. I've seen very few sites using them, usually just demo pages. I noticed that Webreview owns the domain webfonts.com and has a pretty good overview of the technology. I always wanted to do a rich media site with truedoc fonts, but never got around to it. Hey, maybe I'll burn some fonts and try them out here...
posted by mathowie at 11:33 PM on January 31, 2000

Oh, and I thought this page was bloody insane. All fonts...wow.
posted by mathowie at 11:35 PM on January 31, 2000

I was all psyched to use font embedding for the IE4+ version of one of my sites one time, which would have allowed me to do everything I wanted without a single image. And then I found that the embedded fonts had a bigger filesize than the GIFs I would have used instead, and they took longer to render. It'd be cool if the fonts stayed on the system and didn't have to come with the page everytime (I mean, I suppose they cache, like anything else, but from what I recall, it wasn't too zippy).

Not that they're not cool, though. :)
posted by evhead at 4:22 AM on February 1, 2000

Having the embedded font stay on the system is one of those contentious issues that typeface designers and developers have been arguing about for years. Ever since some apps allowed you to embed TrueType outlines in your PowerPoint presentations, for instance, there has been an outcry regarding intellectual property rights and end user licensing limitations for the font in question. What a bag of worms it would open up if web fonts could be permanently downloaded to the system as well. You'd need another layer of security within the browser environment just to keep users from to usurping the type outlines from the browser cache (or font db or whatever) for use elsewhere. That would slow down the whole works once again.
posted by grant at 7:18 PM on February 1, 2000

Once again onteh cool side of all this web-fontishness, the Sooy Type Foundry uses the Bitstream WebFont Engine to build and display dynamic type samples of their library.
posted by grant at 7:25 PM on February 1, 2000