Jul
12
2007

embedded fonts

I’ve come up against a bit of a CSS design quandary.

A colleague today suggested that, in lieu of using a graphic for “designed” text, we could use the @font-face CSS rule to embed a non-Web standard font into a page’s stylesheet. The suggestion actually took me a bit by surprise. I’d read about this technique of font embedding several years ago — maybe as far back as 2000 — but due to cross-browser incompatibilities at the time (I think we were still in the midst of the IE / Netscape wars), I had given up on the idea as impractical.

As I look into it today, years later, it doesn’t appear to have been deprecated in the W3C CSS3 spec, but I’m having a lot of trouble finding any recent writings about it or useful modern examples of its use. I suppose that, in the meantime, people have moved on to other solutions / hacks, like sIFR and the like. I suppose Firefox’s lack of support for @font-face is the nail in the coffin for my own renewed interest.

Still, its mention today piques my curiosity about how (or if) it’s been used in the years since I first read about it. I didn’t think anyone actually used it anymore — if they ever really did in the first place. But the experience has me wondering if I’ve been overlooking something. Has anybody else used this, or have any backstory on it?

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Posted at 12:19 AM in design

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Comments

IIRC, it was so annoying to implement even w/out the browser issues that it just wasn’t worth doing. I think I tried it once after reading that webmonkey article (ah, that takes me back…) and it was cool! for about 10 minutes, but too much of a pain.

It’s a damn clever idea, though.

Posted by Elaine on July 12, 2007 3:56 PM

Same story, was interested in it when it first came out but still cannot implement due to browser conflicts.

Posted by Patrick on July 18, 2007 12:12 AM

Dan Cederholm reports that WebKit (the open source engine behind Apple’s Safari browser) now supports @font-face in its most recent build. It hasn’t been built into an official Safari release yet (and Firefox has yet to jump on board), but it’s great to see another mainstream browser adopting it.

Posted by Aly on October 6, 2007 2:50 AM

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