Up until now, if you wanted to use fonts on a website you were limited to one of the dozen or so ‘web-safe’ fonts (Verdana, Times, Helvetica—you know, the ones you see everywhere on the web). Using other fonts required you to convert the text into images, or to use some hacky Javascript or Flash solution such as sIFR or Cufón.

In a relatively recent development, browsers which support the @font-face rule can access fonts embedded in websites, but most font companies have been reluctant to permit use of their products on the web because of the high risk of software piracy. Typotheque, however, now offers the Typotheque Web Font Service, a font-embedding system which is based on W3C standards, providing a secure, reliable way to use fonts whose files are hosted on a global network of servers (cloud hosting).

Owners of Typotheque font licences can create embeddable fonts via their Typotheque accounts. Simply enter the domains where the font will be used and the languages to be supported, and our system instantly generates a short block of CSS code. Paste the code into your website, and you are ready to start using the font. You will not work with actual font files, just with the CSS code linking to the font files.

sIFR is a workaround which uses Javascript, Flash and CSS to replace the given text with small Flash files. The lengthy processing times involved make it unsuitable for longer texts. Cufón, on the other hand is a Javascript package that draws type outlines. Like sIFR, it runs rather slowly, is difficult to set up, and has some issues with text selection and screen rendering.

Our system uses real fonts exactly like the other fonts that your computer uses to display websites. The only difference is that the font files are not hosted on your computer, but on a secure server.

We wrote a simple tutorial on how to implement the CSS code generated by the Web Font Service.

Fonts are software, and their use is defined by their End-User Licence Agreement. At the moment, most commercial fonts don’t permit font embedding, but all Typotheque fonts can be embedded via our secure server.

We now offer two different font licences. The Print & Web Licence (formerly the Basic Licence) entitles you to download the font files to your computer and use them in print applications as well as on the web. If you only need to use the fonts on the web you can save 80% by buying the Web Licence, which gives you access to the online CSS code generator rather than to actual font files.

The @font-face rule is supported by Firefox 3.5, Safari 3.1, Opera 10, Chrome 5 and Internet Explorer 4.0. Our system is thus compatible with more than 98% of all browsers in use. For older browsers you can define a list of default web-safe font stacks.

For more information see the Wikipedia article on browser usage statistics.

Our Web Font Service Licence doesn’t cover placing the font files on your own server. Use Typotheque’s font-embedding method instead. It automatically generates a block of CSS code that you can use on your site.

Typotheque also offers a separate Server Licence, which is designed for large companies and is priced at €1500 per font. For more information please get in touch.

Typotheque’s font embedding system works with any browser supporting the @font-face rule, so you don’t have to worry about the technical differences between Explorer and other browsers. For the curious and the technically-minded: Internet Explorer supports embedding of EOT (Embedded OpenType) fonts, whereas other browsers use standard TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts. Typotheque’s system, however, creates both TTF and EOT fonts on the fly, so the CSS code it generates works correctly in all compliant browsers.

We use a global network of geographically distributed servers (cloud hosting), so you can be confident that the font files will be available at all times. Specifically, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS), a backbone infrastructure that guarantees the highest possible uptime. The hosting is scalable and can adapt to any kind of application, no matter how fast it grows or how big it gets.

Furthermore, hosting font files on external servers makes loading faster, as font files are subject to the same connections-per-hostname limits as other resources. Loading them from the same server might block other downloads. Using reliable external hosting delivers faster download times by avoiding the blocking issue.

While the licence of the Typotheque Web Font Service doesn’t cover the installation of fonts on external servers, we do offer a special Server Licence which allows installation of fonts on web servers. The fonts must be installed following special instructions. This licence is priced at €1500 per font. For more information please get in touch.

Typotheque hosts fonts on a global content delivery network using Amazon.com’s redundant server architecture. This makes Typotheque webfont hosting faster and more reliable than most of our clients’ own websites.

Because browsers have limits on how many simultaneous requests they can make to individual servers, hosting images or fonts on third-party servers will utilise more connections, loading files much faster than if they were hosted on the same server.

Instead of providing a font file directly to clients, we provide a block of dynamically-generated CSS code for use on the client’s site. The actual font file is hosted on our secure servers, and its URL is not visible to the end user. Furthermore, the fonts are subsetted, using only the characters required by the specific website, which makes downloading of the fonts very fast. And since about 95% of the font information is removed, even if the file is pirated it only contains 5% of the font software.

Additionally, specific font tables that are required for normal use of the fonts are removed, which makes the webfonts unusable in standard computer applications. Finally, all fonts carry a digital watermark which enables tracing of unauthorised users.

Regular Typotheque fonts support over 100 languages and advanced typographic features such as small caps, different numeral styles, alternative characters and special symbols. Web browsers, however, can access only a small fraction of those characters. Removing these inaccessible features makes the files much smaller, so they download much quicker. Users can specify which languages to support.

The @font-face rule is a W3C standard allowing authors to specify online fonts for displaying text on their webpages.

For more information see the W3C article on the @font-face rule.

You pay a one-time fee for the font licence. If you stay within the allocated bandwidth limit (500MB per font per month), there will be no further costs for you. Additional bandwidth costs €0.004 per megabyte, per month.

Unfortunately, web browsers do not support OpenType layout features (yet). But the Typotheque webfont system generates font files on the fly, and can apply OpenType features directly to the file in the process. This enables us to support true small caps as well as various styles of numerals. You can control these advanced OpenType features via your online account.

Don’t use the font-variant:small-caps; property in CSS, as this scales the characters mathematically, rather than using true small caps.

Typotheque webfonts support all languages supported by their print versions. That’s over 200 languages, including those using Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic scripts.

Latin, Greek, Armenian and Cyrillic scripts render consistently in all browsers, but complex scripts such as Arabic or Devanagari require AAT fonts for correct shaping on Macintosh. That means that Windows renders the fonts correctly, but Mac renders in the fallback font (rather than showing unshaped glyphs). We hope that Apple will extend their support for OTF and TTF fonts to render complex scripts correctly.

If you have already purchased an OpenType font licence from us, you can use the licensed fonts on the web via our font embedding system. It also entitles you to 500MB of free bandwidth per month. Additional bandwidth costs €0.004 per megabyte.

To ensure optimal file availability we use a global network of distributed servers. We allocate 500MB of free bandwidth per month per used font. For a typical font file size (approximately 20kB), that translates to 25,000 visitor views per month. Additional bandwidth costs €0.004 per megabyte. Users can monitor usage statistics, so they can know in advance how much they will be billed.

If you plan to use HTTP Secure on your website, you will need to serve the CSS also with the https, otherwise browsers may block the non-secure content. Simply add one more letter to the path of the CSS. e.g.: https://wf.typotheque.com/WF-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx/

Yes.

The Print & Web Licence of our OpenType fonts permits you to download the font files and use them in your favourite print applications. When you want to use them on a website, log in to your account to generate a block of CSS code for your webpage.

Yes, in addition to Print & Web and Web licenses, we also offer a Web Trial Licence, which gives you a bandwidth limit of 50MB and 30 days to evaluate the fonts. After 30 days or 50 MB (whichever comes first), you will be prompted to upgrade to a Web or Print & Web License. If not upgraded, the licensed fonts will expire.

The Web Trial Licence is also limited to a single language font subset and two domains.

Yes you can. Just log in to your account, open your order history, click My Fonts and then the Upgrade button.

For technical reasons, PostScript fonts can’t be used to create web-embeddable fonts, so if you licensed PostScript versions of our fonts, you will first need to upgrade to OpenType versions.

If you already have OpenType versions you can now use them on the web at no extra cost. Just login to your account, and click on Webfonts.

We created an API so that other font vendors can also sell webfont licenses using our system. More information will be available via: www.type-applications.com. Please get in touch to discuss the possibilities.

There is no limit on the number of specified domains.

Yes, you can update the list, adding or removing domains at any time. There is no limit on the number of domains.

Yes, it is possible. Please contact us directly when you are ready to do so. Both users will have to have a Typotheque account and agree to the terms of the licence.

Yes, you can. To set a monthly bandwidth budget, log in to your account, go to Webfonts, and click on Stats. After the monthly limit is reached, the next font specified in the font stack will be used until the end of the month. From the 1st of the next month, the first font will be used again until you reach the limit, or raise the budget limit. You will receive an email notification when the limit is reached.

If you have defined a font stack, the next typeface in the stack will be displayed.

Yes you can. Our CSS is designed to recognise local fonts, and if the given font is installed locally it is used first. In that case the webfonts are not used, so no bandwidth is consumed.

When you use locally installed fonts, you will not be able to control OpenType features such as small caps or numeral styles.

In some browsers, most notably Firefox, you may see a barely noticeable ‘blink’ (a.k.a. Flash Of Unstyled Content) before the real font loads in. This is a result of Firefox’s handling of the @font-face rule.

As a workaround we offer a JavaScript solution that hides content until browsers are finishing loading fonts.

Font rendering is handled by the operating system’s rasterizer. While Apple’s OS X does a great job of rendering all fine details of type on screen, the Windows rasterizer is less refined, so fonts in small sizes don’t look as good as in Mac OS.

You can enhance font display on LCD screens by turning on Windows ClearType. You can further fine-tune ClearType by using the ClearType Tuner.

Follow these steps to enhance screen fonts on Windows:
How to Use ClearType to Enhance Screen Fonts in Windows XP
ClearType Tuner
ClearType Tuner PowerToy

Sure. Below are links to pages that we made.

http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample_2
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample_3
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/multilingual_sample

And here are some of our clients using their fonts online.

Selection of websites using Typotheque fonts

If you have implemented Typotheque fonts on your site, please let us know and we'll consider including a link here.

Because web browsers do not support OpenType layout features, we built a system that generates font files on the fly and can apply OpenType features directly to the file. This enables us to support true small caps as well as various styles of numerals. You can control these advanced OpenType features via your online account.

This means that selecting the checkbox Small Caps will replace the standard lower case letters with true small capitals. You can turn the small caps on and off at any time, while keeping the same CSS code.

If you would like to combine Small Caps and regular lower case, you will need to create two separate webfont projects.

Since the version of Apple iOS 4.2, Mobile Safari in the iPhone and iPad support real fonts in TrueType and OpenType format. The previous version of iOS had to use SVG fonts when using @font-face feature.

Typotheque webfont system supports both SVG and TrueType fonts, to guarantee consistent rendering of webpages in mobile devices, so webfonts will show just fine on your iPad and iPhone regardless of which version of the iOS you use.

Yes, we do.

While in most cases we recommend using Typotheque webfont service, some clients require self-hosting of font files on web servers, which we allow provided the fonts are installed following special instructions. You will need to acquire a Server Licence.

To make the webfont files as small as possible, we remove some inaccessible glyphs, and users can specify languages to support. Licensed fonts can use as many as 5 languages, trial licences work with a single language. You can also specify custom sets, and preview the glyph set directly. Besides the letters needed to render the specific languages, we add following glyphs automatically to every language: !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@[\]_{|}†¢£§•®©™¥¿¡–—“”‘’¤‹›‰€«» ‹›

If you'd like to cancel the monthly webfonts subscription, simply log in to your account, go to My Webfonts, and either Disable, or Delete the active project. Alternatively, you can keep it Active, setting the Monthly Budget to 0 Euro (in Stats).

When reaching the limit of free 500MB per month, you will receive an invoice at the end of the month for the bandwidth that go over the free limit. There is currently no way to pre-pay the bandwidth, you receive an invoice after exceeding the limit.

You will be asked to pay by a credit card for the first monthly payment, and future extra bandwidth payments will automatically charge your credit card.

Quality of font rendering varies greatly depending on platform and application. Mac OSX uses a generic rendering algorithm which displays all fonts equally well and completely ignores font hinting. Windows on the other hand only displays well TrueType fonts which have been optimized (hinted) for the screen. Most problems are with very old versions of Windows 95, where ClearType rasterizer is turned OFF.

We offer two different kinds of fonts Screen fonts extensively hinted for the best results in small sizes for Windows, resulting in sharp legible text
http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/on_screen_reading

All other Typotheque fonts which are simply auto-hinted. Those will work just fine in all operating systems, but if majority of your users use old Windows, than we recommend that you use it in display sizes only (16pt higher). In either case, we recommend that you take the free webfont trial licence, so you can test the fonts in the real situation.

For more details about hinting and screen optimisation, please have a look at this explanation.

Typotheque webfont system offers a possibility to apply Small Caps replacing the standard lower case letters with true small capitals. Sometimes people accidentally turn this feature on, which results in seeing all capital text. You can turn the Small Caps on and off at any time directly in your Account > Webfonts. Because we use a large network of distributed servers, changing the settings take a few hours. In some cases it may take up to 24 to update all the servers and files.

Yes, you can change the billing details at any time. Log in to your Account, and go to My Webfonts. Click on the tab Users, and enter the email address of the new user. The new user must have a Typotheque account with this email address. The new user will receive an email and will need to confirm the change.