Comments on: HTML 5 & web fonts; exciting times

By: Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:00:18 +0000

Aaah I see! Thanks for the reply. Then I guess another possible future (if the typekit-like endeavours don’t work for whatever reason) is that we’ll simply end up with a set of good looking fonts specifically licensed for web usage. I guess “a font I designed is used by 13% of the internet” would look good on a designer’s CV. FWIW, GrauBlau Sans looks very shiny on this here page. It was actually the first thing that caught my eye.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Daniel, I think the point they were trying to make is that just because a font costs nothing, you shouldn't assume you're able to use it however you want. I'm using Graublau Sans Web which is explicitly licensed for use with font embedding. WebFonts.info has a good list of fonts (both free and paid-for) which you can embed on your pages. If you want to use a font which isn't in that list, make sure you check that the license allows you to use it in your pages.

By: Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:57:10 +0000

So here’s a question from a relative CSS noob then: what about the fonts you’re using on this webpage? Are those completely license free? The Typekit PR made it sounds like even free fonts were usually licensed.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:26:25 +0000

Hi Divya,

I believe the Typekit and Typotheque solutions are quite similar, although AFAIK Typotheque will only be offering their own fonts this way, not other foundries’.

I look forward to a long-term solution that doesn’t involve us paying extra for our fonts.

By: Divya

Divya — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:57:22 +0000

There is another solution offered by Typotheque. I quite like it as it doesn't use js, and uses TTF (and EOT for IE). All you need to do, is to include a link to their css file. It even supports multi-lingual fonts. Interesting thing about Typotheque solution is they intend to charge according to bandwidth usage (which I think seems sensible). Of course, these solutions are temporary, and I think the long range outlook is to have .WOFF (Web Open Type Format) and/or EOTL (the EOT without the offending bits). It does seem like Font Foundries are resigned to having raw font linking support on browsers. But, the large size of raw fonts might reduce their usage.

By: Mike H

Mike H — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:30:51 +0000

It makes me wonder what direction IE is going to take, with it being left so far behind in terms of standards and new tech. Think they might ever go to an open source rendering engine and keep the IE shell?