There is at present no decent method for using truly beautiful typefaces on the web. sIFR is mainly useful for title headings but still leaves much to be desired. Straight up image replacement is simply a non-starter. Of late there has been some discussion of @font-face, a CSS attribute that only Safari supports and that would in its current form violate foundry’s licences.

If you are in any way a long-time reader of these pages you will no doubt know that I’m something of a nut for type. At present I have more fonts in my library than I’d care for the rest of the world to know. I would show you all of them but for two issues:

1. There are too many
2. The only way I could do them justice is through images

For some time designers have wanted a method for using their favourite fonts in their web designs. Of course, you could always declare a font in your style-sheet but then you’d have to hope the person on the other end had the aforementioned font.

the arguments

sIFR

sIFR is fine if all you want to do is change a h1 tag here or a h4 tag there. I suppose it’s great for that. Personally I’ve never had much luck or satisfaction with sIFR. Ultimately, though, that’s all sIFR is good for, headings. You could never reasonably use sIFR to typeset a full body of text. The passage you’re reading now could never be set using Palatino Sans with sIFR. Your computer would have choked and died before you reached this paragraph.

Image Replacement

I said this was a non-starter for a number of reasons. First, images don’t scale. You can’t select text from an image. It’s just wholly unsatisfactory. Can you imagine if everything you’re reading now was a giant image? How long would it have taken your browser to load this page and what if you could read my tiny text? If you tried to scale the image up it would become unreadable.

@font-face

Back in October Dave Hyatt announced that Webkit now supported the CSS @font-face rule. The previous link points to the W3C’s CSS2 recommendation which dates back to 1998, nine long years ago. The CSS3 Working Draft continues to list @font-face. There is a problem with this typographical wonder, though.

Basically, a @font-face rule tells your browser to use a certain font to display some text and then points your browser to that font on the server. Your browser downloads the font and presto you see the text as the designer intended. This is all pretty similar to the way that background images are defined.

The difference between pointing to an image and pointing to a font is that you can make the image yourself. It can take as long as a year to several years to design a truly nice typeface. On top of that, there’s no support for @font-face in most browsers. Honestly, no support in all but one browser.

the catch-22

There are those that say we should just use free/open source typefaces. There would be no licensing constraints involved. That’s a lovely idea. There are some lovely free/open source typefaces available on the web. However, most of them are just dogs. By dogs I mean ugly, incomplete, three-legged dogs. That snarl.

which face?

Also, not all free typefaces are created equal. I’ll give an example. Tallys is a rather lovely font created by Jos Buivenga. I happen to like Tallys. Tallys is a free font. Despite the title of the page I linked to above reading a free quality font from exlijbris the bottom of that page rules out Tallys use with @font-face.

This font may not be distributed —not online nor on any media— without my permission

The very nature of how @font-face works precludes Tallys use with that license restriction. @font-face works by distributing the font to the person visiting the web page. In order for anyone to use Tallys with an @font-face rule you’d have to contact Jos and ask him if that was OK with him. I think Jos would quickly make a form letter for dealing with such requests if not for the next problem.

no support

There’s simply no support for @font-face. I fibbed earlier when I said that only Safari supports @font-face. It doesn’t. Webkit, the engine behind Safari does. Specifically, the bleeding edge nightly of Webkit supports it.

Any solution?

Since Hyatt’s announcement back in October a number of people have been thinking and talking about typography on the web. Hyatt just re-ignited a long debate about type and the internet that’s been going on for ages. Here are some simple facts:

1. designers want to use more typefaces on the web
2. type designers want their typefaces used on the web
3. no one has a solution as to how to do this

Here’s where the type foundries stand; I’ll just let Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones speak for himself.

Most of the things that I create these days are for screens rather than presses, and I’m as eager as anyone to find a solution to the situation because I’d like to see our fonts used as widely as possible!

Please understand, though, that as serious as we are about type design, foundries like mine simply aren’t in the driver’s seat when it comes to technology. We manufacture fonts in established formats, and test them in industry-standard environments, and we’re very much at the mercy of the software industry to make it possible for people to make use of our work.
Jonathan Hoefler
via clagnut

the software industry

So, we need to talk to the other industry. By that I mean Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. You really need go no further. Those three organisations are responsible for the majority of the font technology we have today. Adobe came up with PostScript Type 1, Apple invented TrueType, together Microsoft and later Adobe developed OpenType.

Well, it seems Microsoft already came up with a solution, Embedded OpenType. The only problem with EOT is that only Internet Explorer can render .eot fonts and you can only turn a TrueType font into an EOT font using a tool exclusive to Microsoft that uses a technology they borrowed from Agfa Microtype Express.

Clever technology that not everyone can use is useful to no one. There is hope though. According to something I read on Adobe Product Manager for Fonts & Global Typography (quite a title) Thomas Phinney’s blog,

Microsoft has now offered to donate their old EOT web font embedding format to the W3C Thomas Phinney

Unfortunately, in the comments Aaron Gustafson described Microsoft’s offer as inappropriate.

In my mind, the font foundries (large and small) and browser vendors should get together and determine a set of requirements for an open format that meets their needs and does not expose developers (or browser vendors) to legal problems. If they all buy into it, it will become the de-facto format for the web and if it is made open (like PNG), there will be no barriers to its usage. Aaron Gustafson

If that doesn’t make your head pop off I don’t know what will. Development of PNG began in 1995. PNG didn’t get certified as an ISO standard until 2003. Internet Explorer didn’t offer middling support for PNG until version 7 which is only now beginning to reach widespread use.

If we go with Gustafson’s notion of a wise committee I should expect a satisfactory web font solution by 2019. Maybe my nephew will take up design, I’ll be on the way to my first coronary.

Someday

Here we sit. I’d like to show this post to you in FF Meta Serif but I can’t. Foundries would like you to be able to use their fonts on the web but they can’t just give their work away so they must wait for the technology.

Someone on Phinney’s blog tried to compare the foundries to the recording industry. That’s almost a Godwin-ing of the argument. The recording industry doesn’t want you buying music then letting your friend take it from you. Foundries would rather you not push their work at everyone that visits your website.

Consider this, if Facebook started using an @font-face rule for FF Meta Serif then in about a month 50 million people would have downloaded that font file.

Just to make it even more sad let’s consider a font like Proxima Nova. Mark Simonson spent ages designing that font. It is a lovely thing. Mark is all by himself. He’s designed about 15-20 fonts that you can see on his website. He’s a greedy bastard because he would prefer we not give his work to anyone that passes by our blog? No.

Eventually, this post will be irrelevant and instead I’ll write a post about how happy I am with the new whiz-bang fun of setting web type in Hamada Script. But, I think the only way we get there is if a web designer, a typeface designer, and a type developer get together over coffee and hash this out. If we leave it to a committee it may never happen.

My Mac will just have to read web pages to me as I won’t be able to look at Verdana for one more minute.