by Richard Fink on March 9, 2010
Internet Explorer Isn’t The Problem This Time
Since the excitement about @font-face began, certain pages showcasing @font-face fonts have gotten referenced a lot. Unfortunately most of them were not created to display in Internet Explorer. This creates the impression that something must be wrong with Internet Explorer’s @font-face implementation in IE 6, 7, and 8.
There isn’t.
Oh Yeah? Show Me An Example
I took a page titled 10 Great Free Fonts for @Font-Face Embedding by Ralf Herrmann, added the EOT files, left the original @font-face syntax intact, and everything works as expected. Check out the results here:
In the interests of a more accurate side-by-side comparison, you’ll notice that I did comment out the text-shadow hover effects. Text-shadow doesn’t work in IE. For that, I offer no excuses or explanations.
The example page has a notes section at the bottom, detailing what I did.
Appearances Deceive
A big part of the problem was that, for a long time, Microsoft’s abominable WEFT tool was the only app available for creating EOT files. And EOT (Embedded Open Type) is the only file format that IE will accept.
Today, you can convert a TTF font file to an uncompressed “EOT Lite” file using Font Squirrel’s Generator or, create an actual, natively compressed EOT file using EOTFAST. Another online option is ttf2eot.
How @Font-Face In IE Differs
@Font-Face has been in Internet Explorer for over ten years.
No matter what browser you’re targeting, @Font-Face
If WOFF Is Good For The Goose, EOT Is Good For The Gander
Windows problems.
http://readableweb.com/fontface/tenfree/tengreat.htm
Boing Boing
Somebody who knows what they’re doing could spend ten minutes and either fix the font’s hinting in BPreplay or convert it to the TrueType flavor of OpenType…
by Richard Fink on March 2, 2010
Opera Devs Narrowly Avoid The Sting Of Steak Knives
As I recently reported, Opera 10.5 Beta1 suffered a regression in @font-face support to the point where – Boom! – it really didn’t have any @font-face support. To Opera’s credit – and maybe as a result of these watchful eyes and my big mouth – Andreas Bovens ‘fessed up to the whole mess on the Odin developer blog.
[Disclosure: My wife and I once had a Labrador Retriever named Odin. And as a kid I had a cat named Thor. Biased? You be the judge. 
]
Anyway, there had been so many ups and downs with @font-face in Opera since version 10.0, there was no use complaining and – so in the spirit of light-hearted comic relief – I made them an offer I hoped they couldn’t refuse:
If the next release of Opera has a decent implementation of @font-face, Andreas Bovens gets a $100 Amazon gift card from Readable Web. If it doesn’t, the entire Opera development team will get a set of steak knives as a consolation prize and bitter reminder. (With a grateful nod to David Mamet for the idea of the steak knives.) Fair deal? Don’t let Andreas down, now!
How “Decent” Is It?
As the screen grab from this four-member font-family test page shows, everything is showing up as it should except for synthetic bolding and italic.
Another page I used as a indicator is Ralf Herrmann’s 10 Great Free Fonts page on opentype.info. It’s a fairly complex page with five font families having more than a single member and Opera is handling it just fine.
[Note: The 10 Great Free Fonts page was posted early last year, and the CSS within it has been revised at least once. Yet strangely, it has never been enabled for Internet Explorer. In my next post, I'll get it working for Internet Explorer, too, and show you what I did.]
We Have A Winner! Andreas Bovens Gets His Gift Card
As I said, synthetic bolding and italic is still not working as expected. And I have not tested on any platforms other than Window XP. But @font-face on Build 3273 is working pretty well on XP. I’m not going to quibble. I’ll cough up. Thanks to the Opera developers involved with @font-face, Andreas gets his $100 Amazon gift card. Worth every cent to finally see this.
Now, will Andreas or somebody at Opera save me the time and tell me where and how the gift card can get to him? And – BTW – the steak knives thing is from an especially memorable line in the movie (first a play) “Glengarry Glen Ross”.
