WEFT

Web Embedding of Fonts Tool (WEFT)

We have been working with the typography group at Microsoft Corporation in building a tool that makes it possible to use rich sets of fonts in web pages.

This site was designed by using Cascading Style Sheets. This is a recent extension to HTML that provides fine control over the look of text and graphics on web pages. A fundamental part of the look is of course which fonts to use. Further more, CSS allow you to specify the location of the font for those users that do not have the particular font installed on their machine.

A Web borwser that supports CSS and a font format (such as OpenType) may thus download and use those fonts for these web pages. As with all types of files on the internet, size does matter. Several companies have come up with file formats which are both compressed as well as reduced in content. A common way of reducing the content is to remove unused characters, or to only include characters for specific point sizes. Microsoft's format is known as EOT, and features both compression and reduction by removing unused characters. This is very efficient as well as being a loseless format in terms of quality. It's currently supported by Internet Explorer on the Windows and Macintosh platforms.

To use CSS with embedded fonts, you need to create these font files and you need to modify your web pages to refer to these font files. If you want really small font files, then you want to create these files such that they only contain needed characters. WEFT will let you do this. By specifying which pages to process, WEFT determines precicly which fonts to embed and precicely what the used characters are for those fonts. You end up with created font files and modified web pages (if you chose to allow that) on your web server, that are ready to be used as is.

A more extensive description of WEFT can be found at www.microsoft.com/typography/ where you may also download a free copy of the tool.