Beta-testing Typotheque’s Font Embedding Technology

I had the opportunity to beta-test Typotheque’s new font embedding technology. Great job. It worked very well. I secretly applied their fonts on one of my clients’ website so that I can see how it works in the real world situation. Here is before I applied their font:

http://clintonstreetbaking.com

This site makes an extensive use of browser fonts (very little GIF type). So, it was a good candidate for testing this. If you add the argument to the URL “?font=fedra”, the site will be rendered with Typotheque’s Fedra font:

http://clintonstreetbaking.com/?font=fedra

You notice that the browser first renders the page with standard fonts and re-renders it with Fedra. This re-rendering flicker is a bit annoying but unfortunately it’s a limitation of the browser and there is nothing anyone can do about it at the moment. I hope that the future browsers would check the font embedding first before they render the page.

The only requirements for using Typotheque’s font embedding technology are:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://test.typotheque.com/WF-008291-000085" type="text/css" />

And, after inserting this code, you can specify one of their fonts as if it’s a browser font. For instance:

p { font-family: "Fedra Sans Book"; }

That’s really it. Naturally, if you try to use these lines of code on your website, it won’t work because your domain name has not been registered with Typotheque.

They use only CSS to achieve the same thing Typekit does. I cannot say this automatically means better because I’m not aware of the security implications behind Typotheque’s implementation. (I believe the only reason why Typekit uses Javascript is to strengthen the security.)

For now, I believe Typotheque is interested in selling only their own fonts. If so, the security is not a big issue because they would not be liable to anyone else, even if their fonts get pirated. But as soon as they start accepting fonts from other designers, security would be an important aspect to scrutinize.

The administration site for purchasing, licensing for the web, and registering your domain is very well implemented. I had no problem. The user experience was excellent. As I said before in the thread about Typekit, building this type of system isn’t going to be realistic for independent font designers who are not programmers. So, services like this would probably be quite popular in the future. Perhaps Typotheque could even license their system to other foundries who are interested in distributing embedded fonts on the Web.

I would imagine that in 5 years, we will no longer be generating GIF images for non-browser fonts. I can’t wait. The font rendering on Windows would have to improve significantly too. Browser fonts render beautifully on Macs, but on Windows it’s still pretty crude. (Maybe this changed since Vista, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t got no Vista.)

Because the DPI is low on computer monitors (compared to print), at first, I would probably use embedded fonts only for headers. Sooner or later, more font designers will design browser-specific fonts. Web 3.0 will probably have a very distinct look because of the font embedding technology.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page