downladable fonts : Java Glossary

The problem with specifying fonts in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), is your choices will not be honoured unless the user already has that font installed on his operating system/browser. You can ask him to make sure it is installed. If the font is free, you can provide a link to it, and ask him to download and install it, but almost for sure, he will ignore you. What you want is some automatic way of including a crucial font with your web page.

The modern W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) CSS scheme calls the downloadable fonts web fonts. The key is @font-face. You use it like this in your style sheet:

The following font formats may be supported: .eot, .pfb, .pfa, .ttf i.e. embedded-opentype, truetype, opentype, truetype-gx, speedo, Speedo, intellifont. You need to serve the font in several formats, e.g. ones suitable for Windows, Linux, Mac and the browser decides which one it likes best. For example:

• Internet Explorer only supports EOT
• Mozilla browsers support OTF and TTF (TrueType Font)
• Safari and Opera support OTF, TTF and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• Chrome supports TTF and SVG

Disadvantages

• There is the overhead of downloading and installing, which may be repeated after the browser font-cache is flushed.
• Security Warnings: Depending on their individual browser settings, visitors may receive a security warning every time a page accesses an embedded font. Besides being disruptive, the warnings may scare visitors away from your site.
• The font downloaded can only be used for your webpages.
• Generally the only fonts you can use this way are free fonts. Any commercial licenced font typically prohibits you from using it on your website.

Advantages

• Adobe Typekit and FontDeck now let you rent fonts on a yearly basis to use on your web pages. They are downloaded from their servers. They deal with the problem of blocking others from stealing the fonts.