Typotheque
Typotheque Web Font Service screencast demo  07 Sep 2009

Typotheque is in the final stage of testing our Web Font Service. The service offers some unique features:

— Multilingual support
— No JavaScript required
— One license for print & web
— One time license cost
— Advanced OpenType features

The video below presents some of the features in detail, and show how to use Typotheque fonts online under 4 minutes.

See it in High Definition on Vimeo or YouTube

And here is the page from the screencast demo.
www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample_2

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8 comments


Peter Bilak,  9 Sep 2009
Ned, I can certainly understand concerns about third party hosting, but this is what happens when you use Google analytics or any CDN.

We use redundant architecture of Amazon, and in fact hosting it there on might speed things up, fonts will be served more reliably and with lower latency than most of our clients’ sites.
Ned Baldessin,  9 Sep 2009
As a web developer, there's a trade off between convenience and control. For my smaller clients I see myself using this service. But there's no way the bigger ones will accept to have static assets on an unproven external service. I'm talking about sites that host their static assets (images, css, js) on CDNs (Akamaï, etc) to shave off fractions of a second on the page display time. Reliability and control (what happens 2-3 years down the road) is key in those cases.
Would you consider offering a downloadable version for such cases?
Peter Craddock,  8 Sep 2009
Well done on this initiative! It's great to see foundries starting to give web designers something with which to play.
Here's to hoping the movement will grow.
Stijn De Lathouwer,  8 Sep 2009
Peter, yes I read now that Typekit is also suggesting to delay the rendering. Great to hear you are offering some screen-optimised fonts from the start and are comitted to work on your existing collection. A problem I've seen with a lot of font-face samples is the readability in IE on body text.
Peter Bilak,  7 Sep 2009
Josh, Stijn, sorry I missed your IE question. Yes, the system already works with Internet Explorer. Look at this page above to try it yourself. Our system creates both TTF and EOT fonts on the spot and serves the right ones to the right browser.

Here is a sample of Explorer 6 on Win.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/typotheque/3897352707/
Josh,  7 Sep 2009
Excellent stuff. It would seem that because there's no JavaScript, loading times are quicker, so the flicker problem is much less severe.

You never answered Stijn's question about whether Internet Explorer's EOT support will be supported. Peeking at the demo, it appears not yet, but do you plan to offer this at a later date? I imagine that it needs some wizardry, but TypeKit have managed it.
Peter Bilak,  7 Sep 2009
Thanks Stijn, those are all very good questions. 1. Flicker, or the flash of unstyled fonts is something that FireFox does when loads fonts via @font-face, even when you use local fonts. There are two possibilities to get rid of it: a/change the behaviour of the browsers; b/ delay rendering the page until all is ready to render. That can be done with some extra JavaScript. Since we were quite happy not to use any JS, we are not considering what is the best way to go about this.

2. Fonts will work in FireFox. Here is the sample from the screencast
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample_2

3. At this stage we worked on the delivery system, and after the launch we will offer special screen-optimised fonts. Manually hinting fonts is extremely time-consuming, so we will first offer three packages. At the same time, we work on fine-tuning other fonts.
Stijn De Lathouwer,  7 Sep 2009
Looks good. Interesting to see if you get the same font flicker in FireFox as Typekit seems to suffer. Also, will the fonts work in IE? And are they adapted to render well in cleartype?
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