About font production

Font production notes      OT production      OT resources      Font tweets

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 supports WOFF font format

v1.01 (10 October 2010) / v1.0 (20 October 2009)

The WOFF web font format emerged from a heated discussion that took place this summer on the W3C's www-font list. This format has an sfnt-like structure, not unlike TTF and OTF fonts, and holds compressed font tables. It combines the ZOT format (its file format) as proposed by Mozilla's Jonathan Kew and the .webfont format (its metadata) as proposed by Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland.
And now, only few weeks later, Mozilla announces that Firefox 3.6 will be the first browser to support this format for use with @font-face.
One advantage of WOFF fonts is their smaller file size compared to OTF and TTF fonts – compression is an essential part of the format. Another advantage is that type foundries may (if they like) include a set of metadata as defined in the WOFF specification which, in the long run, may be displayed by web browsers which helps making transparent who are the owners and licensees of fonts, and since information are in XML they are human readable.
Safari and Opera still support raw TTF and OTF fonts only, while Internet Explorer supports only EOT fonts. Type foundries encourage browser makers to add support for WOFF fonts. Mozilla has demonstrated that this is not too hard to implement. In the meantime, type foundries will be busy producing fonts suitable for use with @font-face – making sure that fonts will be rasterized well even in demanding environments, and manufacturing and testing fonts in the according formats: WOFF and EOT.
KLTF does not allow @font-face linking with raw OTF fonts. Instead, there will be WOFF and EOT fonts For @font-face linking. Stay tuned!

p.s.

Spelling had been changed from 'wOFF' to 'WOFF'. Still I think that 'wOFF' – 'w' plus 'OFF' – better expresses what the format is about: 'OFF' (Open Font Format) is ISO/IEC-standardized 'OTF' (OpenType Font format) while 'w' signifies the web wrapper around an OFF font, i.e. table compression plus optional metadata.
The original specification of the WOFF format was hosted on Jonathan Kew's page at Mozilla's site.
In April 2010, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera jointly submitted the WOFF file format to the W3C, at which occasion the specification got a new home at the W3C's site, along with an editors' draft which is to be considered as work in progress.
While WOFF and web fonts in general are still being discussed on W3C's www-font list, the working group's discussion of the WOFF format takes place on the W3C's public-webfonts-wg list.

Further reading

John Daggett's Web Open Font Format for Firefox 3.6.
John Daggett's CSS3 Fonts as well as its earlier Japanese version.
Tal Leming's WOFF Tools.
For more links related to web fonts and @font-face, please go to Twitter – most tweets to date are about this subject – or the tweet archive.


Link for your feed reader.