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Font Foundries Opening Up To the Web

Posted by timothy on from the but-what-about-printing dept.

Tiger4 writes "A huge number of fonts are migrating from the print-only world to the Web. As the browser manufacturers get on board, the WWW will be a much more interesting place (see the article illustration). 'Beginning Tuesday, Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world, is making 2,000 of its fonts available to Web designers. The move follows that of San Francisco-based FontShop, which put several hundred of its fonts online in February. In just a few weeks, Font Bureau, a Boston designer of fonts, will make some of its typefaces available online as well.' With any luck, the transition period to font-richness will be briefer and less painful than the waving-flag, jumping-smiley, flashing-text era HTML explosion."

4 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. More is good, but by Dachannien · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...we really just need one less.

  2. But will IE accept the new font files? by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We got into the current mess of text in images because Microsoft wouldn't support Mozilla's font files. Is IE going with the standard this time around, or do we have another browser incompatibility issue?

    1. Re:But will IE accept the new font files? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, Microsoft is implementing the WOFF standard, along with all the other browsers.

  3. Re:Just what I want. More external crap the user h by kevinmenzel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because generally speaking, free fonts are crap: They often don't come with lower case numerals, proper small-caps, decent contextual ligature support, multiple weights, properly prepared bold, oblique, and bold-oblique forms, proper hinting at small sizes, and variations of different optical sizes. All of which SOMEONE has to come up with, and properly implement. And that person/people SHOULD be paid for the insane amount of work required to prepare even the basic latin alphabet in all these variations, let alone implementing decent unicode support...