Tag Archives: woff

TrueType, OpenType, EOT, WOFF and SVG Fonts

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Last update : February 20, 2001
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType offers font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font heights.

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts which is built on TrueType, retaining TrueType’s basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior.

Other font types are :

  • Embedded OpenType (EOT) fonts are a compact form of OpenType fonts designed by Microsoft for use as embedded fonts on web pages. These files usually use the extension “.eot”.
  • Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format, based on the sfnt file structure (used in TrueType and OpenType fonts) and specifically designed for web use with the @font-face declaration. It was developed by Jonathan Kew (Mozilla Corporation), Tal Leming (Type Supply) Erik van Blokland (LettError).
  • SVG Fonts are supported in the W3C spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html).

The following links give access to Font libraries :

A @fontface generator is available at the Font Squirrel website. A very useful guide about font embedding has been published by Joshua Johnson on the Six Revisions website. A guide about the Google Font API has been published by Divyang Patel on the same website. How to achieve cross-browser @font-face support is the title of a tutorial published on the website lost in the woods.