Comments on: Webkit joins Opera with @font-face support

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 04:14:20 +0000

Actually, Opera doesn’t support @font-face, at least in the currently released version 9; perhaps you were referring to a development version?

http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/opera9/css/

By: Simon Jia

Simon Jia — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:32:47 +0000

now let’s the brave IE and Firefox teams to follow this as well.

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:32:43 +0000

For what it’s worth (and to play devil’s advocate for a minute), Apple didn’t come up with smooth font rendering – that was done by the boys at Xerox Parc, among a few other UI things. ;) Nonetheless, it’s still clear Apple have always been quite aware of designers’ desires to have pretty fonts.

I used to create embeddable EOT files for use with IE – MS made a font embedding tool that would export these files, and one interesting aspect of this was the licensing; that is, the font had a bit specified by its creator, controlling whether or not you were allowed to export the font to an EOT for use on the web. When creating the EOT, you could also specify what domain(s) you wanted the EOT file to work on, which was supposed to help further restrict the font’s use. This wasn’t a bad idea, but the “embed” bit was easily editable.

I can see the argument for “DRM” on fonts, but I think it sounds like a limitation or excuse for not implementing support at this point despite being an oft-desired feature (for pretty design, etc.) The same argument could have presumably been made for all sorts of other formats presented in-browser (images, video, MP3s etc.), but I think it was clear that the web would be a much more boring place without those. Yes, copyright may be an issue, but I think the ability to embed fonts is something sorely missing. Just as long as they don’t allow Comic Sans anywhere. ;)

By: Jenna Fox

Jenna Fox — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:23:31 +0000

Since when has Opera supported @font-face? Iâ€™ve been googling about this a bunch and canâ€™t find anything agreeing with it except for the quoted article. Operaâ€™s own website even explicitly says it doesnâ€™t support the construct.

By: Mark Holton

Mark Holton — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 07:26:28 +0000

…Great to see. Steve Jobs has before expressed his enjoyment of fonts and typefaces from his days taking a calligraphy class at Reed College and how this came back to him when they were creating the first Mac and the multiple fonts they included (which was later copied by Windows). His speech is linked below in text form as well as video form. Nice to see this make its way to the browser finally, and no doubt others will follow suit in time. ……….he tells the font/calligraphy story in his Stanford commencement speech — good opportunity to share some inspiring words, so hope you get a chance to take a look and enjoy:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-204609026222503944&q=steve+jobs+stanford

By: Alex Russell

Alex Russell — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:34:25 +0000

This is excellent!

Note though that this is on the “feature branch”, not on the mainline nightlies. Lots of great stuff is happening out there, but with as stable as TOT is getting (and with Apple’s announced Leopard timeframe), I’d be surprised to see work like this landing for Leopard. Would be nice if they’d give us some visibility to that effect, though. Guessing when Apple will give us new features in the browser (and on what OS revs) is only made slightly less painful than waiting on IE because they do (most) of their work in public.

Great that they’re taking this step, though. It really will open up a new dawn for typography on the web most deployed browsers support this.

By: Rasmus L. Knabe

Rasmus L. Knabe — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:17:08 +0000

This is great news! – Have tryed it out but can’t get i to work thoug.. Anybody know of a online demo of this?