Openness with Free Web Fonts

If you want to design a webpage with stylish font. There are few important things to consider before using graphical text images.

If you prefer search engines bring traffic to your web page, it has to be Search engine friendly, as of now crawling engine ignore text written in images. (BTW, can search engines improve to extract text from image and index? like Quick Quest does ;)
The font should be rendered and displayed consistent across multiple browsers.
When viewed through mobile browser, it should wrap (as normal text do) to fit the small screen.

Its now old fashion to choose the most common font (either Times New Roman or Arial, that are for sure exist in users computer) and design the page accordingly to stay safe.

Things have changed, so the approaches.

To respect above points, HTML font embedding became essential need to design impressive web page (SrushtiSoft.com home page is using font embedding. Its live now!).

Back in 1997, Microsoft released Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT) which allows to create font objects (.eot) file from our favorite True Type Font (TTF) and refer it in CSS. That's all! Any page viewed in Internet Explorer started rendering our favorite font even if it is not present in user's computer.

That's really cool.

As usual, Microsoft restricted this openness only to IE browsers and that made many web developers to ignore this effort silently. (However, Microsoft is still active on WEFT initiative and anytime may strike back)

So there comes Google with free open source Web Fonts! http://www.google.com/webfonts.

As of now there are 291 free open source fonts for embedding. With each font, Google provide a quick guidelines on how to use in a web page.

Your jaw drops when you see Google giving just 2 lines to integrate web fonts!

SrushtiSoft home page uses one very decent font out of 291 Google web fonts. We tested it over 100+ browsers on Linux, Windows and Android platforms and very few browsers failed to render.

I sense strong future of web fonts as they make web pages to render without mandating users to install required font. For a web developer, there is so much of relaxing factor in it. :)

Comments

Anonymous said…

good one. Could see your post after a long time. :) - Boms

1:16 PM

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