Feb 26th 2008

Font Embedding Revisited

In a post a few weeks ago I mentioned that both Kestrel and Firefox 3 supported font embedding. It appears I was incorrect as in my tests Kestrel and Firefox 3 were pulling the typeface from my system instead of the embedded one. My stupid mistake.

However, this brings up something interesting because Håkon Wium Lie stated that it was time for other browsers to implement font embedding. Apple did. What about Opera? Anyone know if there are plans to implement this before Kestrel goes final?

Responses

  1. Cyro Mar 05, 2008 10:02:57

    Kestrel will go final next summer.

    There are tons of small bugs and some performance issues they still have to fix.

    I will appreciate if they get focused on fixing all that, before releasing (even more) new features.

  2. Dustin Wilson Mar 05, 2008 11:54:43

    Don’t know where you pulled that released date out of, but oh well. Most of its problems appear today to be stability problems especially on Windows. The rest are UI bugs and tweaks followed by site specific fixes. Last, but not least, there are a small bit of rendering bugs here and there.

    This isn’t a very new and cutting edge feature. It’s something Internet Explorer has and Mozilla had the capability to do at one period of time. I just find it odd that Opera’s own CTO calls for this to be widely supported and Safari’s the only browser that implements it… at least so far. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’d be nice to know whether it is even considered for Kestrel or if it’ll be pushed back for Peregrine.

  3. Cyro Mar 05, 2008 12:10:56

    The CEO said the release date was scheduled for next summer. He said that in one of his many interviews. Here

    Read last paragraph.

  4. Dustin Wilson Mar 05, 2008 13:14:49

    The company plans to release a beta version of Opera 9.5 in the next two months. The final version should be available by this summer.

    This summer. That’s the timeframe I heard, myself, before… but still doesn’t mean that an addition to Kestrel’s excellent CSS3 support couldn’t be added between now and sometime this summer (or later if problems occur).

  5. area42 Mar 05, 2008 16:48:28

    Font Embedding would be really cool for the web. I hope other browsers will support it too. Is the way webkit support font embedding the same as IE does?

  6. Dustin Wilson Mar 05, 2008 17:23:35

    Safari only embeds truetype fonts, but doesn’t use the same method Internet Explorer did. The methods Internet Explorer embed fonts have been abandoned by Monotype, the people who created the technology. To simplify what it does is that it adds DRM to a font file to where people can’t just download the font off of your server, pirating it. Just do a google search for Microsoft WEFT and download their program. If you’re lucky (after using the horrendous interface) you might get an eot file out of it. That’s what Internet Explorer uses. However, I’m unsure what IE 7 or 8 (as the beta is out as of today) supports.

    Embedding truetype fonts is what Håkon Wium Lie was proposing. If Opera was to implement it it’d be using truetype fonts.

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