WOFF2 Adoption?

Dave Crossland
Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
edited September 2014 in Type Design Software
I'm curious who is adopting woff2, besides Google Fonts?

Comments

  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    I haven't seen any type of tests for browsers not supporting woff2.

    How does Firefox handle the requests if woff1 and woff2 are specified in the font-face rule for example? Does it skip the woff2 or does it load both?

    The examples i've seen that use the base64 encoded approach seem totally useless to me - why would i embed the same font data twice (once compressed by something like 30% and once uncompressed) just to serve the 2 browsers that support woff2!?

  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    FontSquirrel added WOFF2 yesterday.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    I think only older MSIE takes all the font files irrespecive of if it handles the format; @font-face has a 'format' optional argument for this case: 
    @font-face {
      font-family: 'Roboto';
      font-style: normal;
      font-weight: 400;
      src: local('Roboto Regular'), local('Roboto-Regular'), url(http://fonts.gstatic.com/s/roboto/v13/oMMgfZMQthOryQo9n22dcuvvDin1pK8aKteLpeZ5c0A.woff2) format('woff2');
      unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2212, U+2215, U+E0FF, U+EFFD, U+F000;
    }
    base64 seems like madness to me. :)
  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    Well ... assuming the average font is 35kb, a regular website maybe uses 3 different styles and woff2 reduces each file by 7kb, we are talking 21kb circa, right?

    What happened to MicroType Compress btw, is that part of woff2 now?

    I have no idea how many people worked on that woff2 spec and how much time was spent on it, but I'd prefer if someone was working on something like protecting web fonts to be installed for desktop usage or similar instead of saving some kilobytes ;)
  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    eot works/worked pretty good in terms of »protection«, but nobody cared.

    Why wait Thierry? Opera and Chrome work fine and everyone else won't notice you are serving woff2, too.

    You also have to educate your paying customers, since many still do not understand there are various license models for various usage scenarios.

  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    eot works/worked pretty good in terms of »protection«, but nobody cared.
    Only because nobody was using EOT. If EOT had caught on someone would have released a free EOT cracking tool.
  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    Everyone was using eot and still does!? Also if there is something to reverse engineer (especially if it has a Microsoft stamp on it) people will try to reverse engineer it, just to proof it can be done.
  • Thierry Blancpain
    Thierry Blancpain Posts: 210
    As I said – I simply don’t care very much about people stealing our fonts. I’m happy about our paying customers and everything I do is to serve them the best I can. Energy invested in trying to deter any piracy is lost time, in my eyes.
    Why wait Thierry? Opera and Chrome work fine and everyone else won't notice you are serving woff2, too.
    Because we have lots of things to work on, and supporting a format that is not very widely supported yet by browsers is not the most pressing of those.
  • Grzegorz Rolek
    Grzegorz Rolek Posts: 22
    Lars,
    What happened to MicroType Compress btw, is that part of woff2 now?
    In part, yes. Mainly the transformed glyf/loca tables are based on those found in MicroType Express.
  • SiDaniels
    SiDaniels Posts: 277
    edited September 2014
    Regarding EOT the spec was submitted to w3C so it's out there. No need to reverse engineer. Also the "t2embed.dll" Windows component can be used to convert from EOT back to TTF.

    Regarding WOFF 2.0 adoption, I don't think the standard is final yet, http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF2/spec/ I would expect browsers and the commercial web font services might be waiting for the standard to be official.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,172
    Regarding WOFF 2.0 adoption, I don't think the standard is final yet
    It isn't, but the peculiarity of the W3C chicken and egg scenario is that two independent implementations are necessary before a recommendation can be published as an official spec. So it's a good thing that not all the browser makers are waiting. :)

    The working group is examining conformance testing requirements at the moment.
  • SiDaniels
    SiDaniels Posts: 277
    Thanks for the info John, so I guess we need to be making WOFF 2.0 web fonts to test the implementations. :-)

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