Finding/tweaking the parameters used to generate a licensed WOFF

jaimes
jaimes Posts: 13
edited December 2024 in Font Technology
I bought a license to a typeface for use on the web, and use the provided WOFF2. I recently had a look on Windows, and the fonts look terrible.

From experience, having bought some stuff from Fontspring, which provides a webfont generation page for licensed fonts, the settings there make a huge difference. I consistently found it best to use the hinting and metrics from the font, rather than autohinting as seems the default.

For my present case:

1. Is there a tool that can tell me which parameters were used generating the WOFF?
2. Is there a tool that can modify the WOFF, if possible keeping any required identification to be in compliance for the licensing?

Or is the WOFF a black box?

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,262
    WOFF and WOFF2 are quite different webfont formats, so always try to be clear about which you are talking about: WOFF uses a very simple and direct compression of the input font (akin to zipping a file), while WOFF2 uses a more complex compression that actually modifies some of the input font data

    But both formats are basically compressed forms of whatever .ttf or .otf font is used as input, so there really are no parameters that affect the WOFF or WOFF2 file directly, but only affect the input font. If a vendor such as Fontspring provides settings options for generating webfonts, what they are actually doing is applying changes to the input font before generating the webfont file.

    So there is no information you can glean from the WOFF or WOFF2 file except what you can see in the decompressed font. You can’t tell, for example, whether any upstream source font has manual hinting, only what hinting exists (or not) in the input font for the webfont file. It may be the case that the font in question was only ever autohinted, or not hinted at all.
  • jaimes
    jaimes Posts: 13
    edited December 2024
    Thanks for your answer. The purchase came with woff2 only.
    From what you say, I gather I can't tweak the woff2 itself.
    I think generating my own woff2 from the OTF fonts is not supported by the license.
    The OTF files render quite a bit better on Windows, so I do think there's hinting there.

    I have contacted the vendor and was told they'd reported the issue. Meanwhile I wanted to see if I could do some investigation myself.

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