>What’s the best practice for subsetting a font you already have?
That’s a top question on my how-to list. The more I’ve tested and analyzed, the more essential I think subsetting is. After all, why do I have to bloat my page when I know that all the un-editable text is covered by just the glyphs for the English alphabet? It doesn’t make sense. In fact, the Microsoft WEFT tool for creating EOT files for linking in IE will subset to the exact characters contained in the page or the entire web site, for that matter.
No, I don’t know of an online tool. Yet. But it’s only a matter of time. FontForge has the capability and it’s only a matter of adapting it. Simo Kunnen, the developer behind Cufón would be a good one to ask about this because he’s already done it, but for producing Cufón javascript “font” files, not an actual font file.
in the meantime, I’ve been using a font editing app. Easy enough to do. But then there are issues about naming and having multiple files for the same font, etc… everything has its ins and outs.

@philippe

If you don’t ask, you don’t learn! Now I know what Minefield is and the name says it all. I get the picture – the last thing I’m looking to do is create more of a mess than we’ve already got. No worries.

regards to all,
rich

The specific Minefield build you are talking about above was a one-off, purely experimental build to show case the possibility of the whatever-it-will-be-called new web font format. It is not available anymore, and the patches that it used has since been modified, afaik – as has the spec behind the idea. I don’t think it is a good idea to spread it around…)

(I know, Roc and Jonathan mentioned all this on the www-fonts mailing list, but your readers may need read that).

Have you seen a font subsetting tool? AFAIK there’s only the Web font optimizer but that only handles the fonts it provides. What’s the best practice for subsetting a font you already have?

I’m a little surprised to hear WOFF is in Minefield. I knew there is the experimental build with EOT-Lite and webOTF/WOFF but didn’t know it had landed in trunk.

Looking forward to the rest of what you’ve got.