It's no secret that fonts on the web suck. The problem is that, in order to use a font on the web, the actual font file must exist on the user's computer. Given that restriction, and all the variations between operating systems, designers end up with about five or six fonts that are universal enough to use in web design.
It makes for a pretty limited typeface palette. There is, however, a potential solution on the horizon. CSS provides an @font-face declaration which can be used to point to a regular TrueType or OpenType font file that lives somewhere on a web server. Safari supports @font-face, Firefox 3.1 (the alpha of which will be public soon) will as well, and Opera is planning to include it in a future release.
Once those three browsers all support @font-face, it will be available to, depending on who you ask, between 30 percent and 50 percent of users. That's a pretty healthy number, more than enough for most designers – IE users can always be served a different stylesheet.
Unfortunately font foundries, the people who create, sell and license fonts, have thus far been reluctant to embrace licensing terms that would allow designers to serve fonts. The foundries fear that users would be able to pirate the fonts much more easily if the files were on the web.
But blogger/designer Richard Rutter has a potential solution. He recently put out a call to font foundries to stop worrying about piracy and find a way to make font-embedding work for them. "Font foundries could license their fonts for embedding and serve those fonts only to registered websites," he writes.
The idea is something like what Google does with its embedded maps application. In other words, you would pay for the license, register your domain and then serve the font files you need by linking back to the server.
As Rutter points out, "the Web Fonts spec has always specified that 'downloaded fonts should not be made available to other applications.'" The font exists only within the browser. Now could hackers figure out how to get the file out of the browser and onto their PCs? Probably, but that's a pretty small amount of people – probably a smaller number than are already pirating fonts through bittorrent files.
There is of course another possible solution, Microsoft's EOT technology which was proprietary, though the company is pushing for it to become an open standard. Unfortunately EOT has some very DRM-like controls built in, which could prove problematic, though not necessarily.
In a comment on Rutter's post, well-known designer Jason Santa Maria writes:
Still, despite some solutions on the horizon we've yet to see any font foundries take any steps toward implementing a solution. Will it happen eventually? As Rutter says, it's really up to the font foundries.
At least for now, you're still pretty much stuck with Helvetica, Arial and the rest of the old standbys.
[via Jeff Croft, font drawer photo by wheany, Flickr]
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