To maintain accessibility and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there’s often a need to be creative with fonts. This is sometimes due to aesthetics, but often to meet technical needs like foreign non-Latin languages that have unique characters/glyphs not normally installed on workstations. Producing images for each character would be very time consuming, bandwidth intensive and destroy search engine rankings.
Create embedded fonts using one of 2 available formats:
1. Portable Font Resources (.pfr): TrueDoc technology was developed by Bitstream and licensed by Netscape. It can be viewed by Navigator 4.0+ and Explorer 4.0+ on Windows, Mac, and Unix platforms.
<link rel = “fontdef” src=”myfont.pfr” />
2. Embeddable Open Type (.eot): Compatible only with Explorer 4.0+ on the Windows platform. Create .eot files using Microsoft’s free Web Embedding Font Tool (WEFT).
<style type=”text/css”>
<–!
@font-face {
src:url(/fonts/myfont.eot);
}
–>
</style>
References:
- http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/overview.html
- http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/
- http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/weft00.htm
- http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/default.htm
- http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol3/css_no15.htm
- http://www.ssi-developer.net/design/embed-font.shtml
- http://www.will-harris.com/wire/html/truedoc.html
- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1309279,00.asp
- http://www.cameraontheroad.com/index.php?p=524
- http://groups.msn.com/MicrosoftWEFTuserscommunity/_homepage.msnw?pgmarket=en-us
- http://www.bitstream.com/fonts/support/webfont_support/index.html
Tutorials:
- http://www.webmonkey.com/design/fonts/tutorials/tutorial2.html
- http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/99/45/index1a.html
Cheers!