Ascender Corporation, a leading provider of advanced font products, today announced FontEmbedding.com, a new website dedicated to the issues of font software usage, technology and licensing. The announcement was made during a panel session on Web Fonts and Font Embedding at TypeCon 2008 held in Buffalo, New York.
The FontEmbedding.com website is intended to be an educational resource and a forum for everyone that designs, develops or uses fonts, including type designers, web developers, IT administrators, and software developers. The website features a variety of articles on font usage, licensing & font technology, font embedding tools and a blog to spur discussion on these topics.
Font embedding is a technique that provides viewers of documents with the ability to see the fonts which the author used on to design the original document. The first embedded fonts were truly embedded in a document – they were not external resources but rather included inside the document. And now with web pages there are ways to let web designers post fonts to a web site that can be downloaded along with web pages. However commercial fonts from Ascender Corp and many other commercial font vendors do not allow fonts to be posted to servers as part of the basic font workstation license.
There are currently three viable methods for providing non-standard font styles on web pages:
* sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)
* Font Linking (such as featured in the new Safari 3.1 browser)
* Embedded OpenType (EOT)
Each method provides richer font choices for web pages, but only EOT, such as supported by Internet Explorer, works in conjunction with the embedding permissions encoded within fonts by type designers. Ascender has developed a prototype web-based utility to generate EOT files and is premiering this utility on the FontEmbedding.com website.
“Font embedding and web fonts is a broad and complex topic, and we hope this website becomes a valuable resource for everyone who is involved with fonts to learn more about proper font usage and licensing” said Bill Davis, Vice President of Ascender Corp. “We also want to encourage the web community to embrace Embedded OpenType (EOT) as the preferred method of embedding fonts into web pages because embedded fonts are tied to specific Web pages and are packaged in a way that prevents casual misuse.”
For more information visit https://www.FontEmbedding.com
This article was last modified on December 17, 2022
This article was first published on July 21, 2008
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