[OpenFontLibrary] font linking bandwidth issues

[Liam R E Quin]

On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 18:05 +0100, James Weiner wrote:
[...]
> size of the two weights of the font is ~600Kb which is far too much to  
> expect people to download (even with broadband as fast download time  
> is crucial for text). Something up to 100Kb would be OK. Does anyone  
> know any way of sub-setting a font easily? It's a commercial font and  
> I have a license covering its use on the web but I can't edit the font  
> files directly

The Microsoft "weft' tool will make a subset of a font and save it in
a compressed format (EOT) that works with Internet Explorer; if you
can't edit the font files, next step is to compress with gzip -9, or
to use the apache mod_deflate; this may work fairly well, depending
on the font format, although generally not as well as EOT.  So I'd
consider using 2 separate files for each font -- one in EOT, and
one a compressed font with gzip for other browsers.

You could also make a subsetted version with fontforge, although I
don't know if your end user licence agreement allows that; it sounds
like it might not.  You could always ask the font vendor how much
they would charge to make a subsetted version.

Having said that, remember that if you have web forms, and want those
to use your font, you have to support the full character set that
people might type.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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