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Typotheque endorses new font format WOFF

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woff blog

Summer, which is usually the quietest period of the year, has been unusually active and exciting time for people interested in typography on the Web. There has been several font proposals for a new font format specific for the use on the Web, and plenty of discussions about future of typography, and font licensing.

One of them, originally named .webfont, now renamed to WOFF has reached a wider support of type community, and has been warmly embraced by smaller type foundries such as Commercial Type, Emigre, Underware, etc, but also large companies such as Adobe, Linotype, and Monotype*. This proposal by Erik van Blokland (LettError), Jonathan Kew (Mozilla Corporation), Tal Leming (Type Supply) addresses the concerns about unlicensed distribution expressed by many type designers and foundries and holds the promise of a web-friendly, interoperable font format for the future. It it an inclusive format, where glyph outlines can be defined as PostScript or TrueType (or anything else that might come in the future).

Typotheque has been busy developing our own Web font service, which right now uses TrueType and EOT fonts. However, we have been supportive of a new specific web font format from the very beggining, and now that the format has been officially supported by the upcoming version of Firefox 3.6, Typotheque endorses the WOFF specification, as a Web font format, and expects to license fonts for Web use in this format in the future.

We hope that other browsers will join in implementing the WOFF format.

* See the full list of supporting type foundries.