During the session Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On, I had some additional thought on some of the technical and legal issues surrounding web fonts and font linking, regarded by the panelists as the one of the most promising future developments in web typography.

Font linking certainly isn’t a new concept – the @font-face property made its debut with CSS2 way back in 1998 – but cross-browser compatibility issues, legal constraints and competing font formats have kept it from becoming commonplace. For those of you who are unfamiliar with font linking, the idea is simple. The @font-face property in CSS2 allows for non-core fonts to be specified via a URL in the CSS code, so they can be downloaded and installed to render them available to a web page.

Unfortunately, since the CSS of any web page can be easily viewed, the direct URL to the font file can be determined and anyone can download the font to their system. The foundries and resellers view this as redistribution, which is in direct violation of every End User License Agreement (EULA). There are ways round this, of course, such as Jon Tan’s suggestion of adding a simple rule to the .htaccess file to prevent downloads. Hoefler & Frere Jones (the foundry responsible for the Gotham typeface, widely used in Obama’s election campaign last year) have realized the risks involved and have modified their EULA to restrict use of their fonts with font linking, a move which some view as a step back for standardization of the CSS property.

Of course, it’s not just legal issues that are hindering progress in this area. Multiple font formats and browser compatibility issues are also to blame. As well as the standard TrueType (TT) and OpenType (OT) formats, Microsoft has developed its own EOT format (Embedded OpenType), currently regarded as the protection standard. However, compatibility of these font formats, and the @font-face property across all browsers is sporadic at best. Also worth considering is that many fonts used for print aren’t adequately hinted for use on screen and don’t make appropriate choices for setting legible text.

There is also an issue with OT font file sizes. Take Arial Unicode, for example. Designers have long complained about the lack of true small caps, lining figures, alternate characters, fractions and ligatures in web typography. Arial Unicode is an OT format font which contains a massive 50,377 glyphs, containing all these plus much more, as well as various other alphabets such as those used in Hebrew, Thai, Korean Wansung and Traditional/Simplified Chinese. The down side of this is the file size, weighing in at a whopping 23MB, which makes is far too large a download to be used for font linking. One solution to adverse font file sizes could be to allow a partial extraction of only required glyphs into a custom generated font file, similar to how Cufon works, and the way that Flash allows embedding of a user-defined range of characters from a font in .swf files. Obviously, this would couldn’t happen, given current EULAs.

There’s a lack of trust between web and type designers. Web designers need to build on that trust and ensure the type designers that they aren’t going to rip them off (even though, inevitably, that will happen to some degree). Nobody wants to pay hundreds of dollars for a typeface, only to have someone download it for free by examining your CSS. Perhaps what’s needed is a complete overhaul of the way we purchase and license typefaces. Development of separate font formats for print and web could be one way of dealing with piracy. This would discourage, say, print designers downloading a font from the web for use in their print projects, and vice versa. Typefaces could be licensed in the same way as stock photography and illustration (rights managed – purchased for a specific medium over a set period of time – or royalty free) and embedded at purchase with the licensees information, locking the purchased fonts to specified users.

Font linking, although being present since 1998, is still in its infancy. The core fonts need development to give designers the typographic options they want. Font foundries need to develop their own typefaces by improving hinting for use on screen, and work with browser developers to solve font format and piracy issues. The different browser developers need to work together instead of competing against each other to standardize font linking and the way typefaces are rendered on screen. Finally, designers need to apply pressure to all parties by increasing the use of font linking in their projects.

Font linking needs to evolve to survive.

Links for resources and further reading are available at www.sxswtypography.com