R – Font licensing on the web

fontssifrtypography

I'd like to do nice typography on the web– that is, fonts other than the limited set of "web safe" fonts.

Reasonable choices (considering accessibility and SEO) seem to be Cufón or sIFR or maybe @font-face.

Which approach has some blessing from font foundries? Are some foundries more web-friendly? I know there are free font houses, but I don't know of a good free font catalog.

Best Answer

Generally speaking, Font Linking (e.g. @font-face) will violate the EULA for the font you're using, because it is based on redistributing the font file. Ergo, you can't. Of course, there are fonts which allow this.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones mentions sIFR in their FAQ under point 20: http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php. To summarize, they are fine with it, as long as you take all measures possible to prevent easy reuse of the Flash file. I have not seen this from other foundries. That said, Flash embedding should be known by now, and IFR/sIFR is about six years old, with no lawsuits that I know of.

I am unsure about Cufón, since its rather easy to reuse a Cufón font file in different settings. But please note that I do not wish to spread FUD about a 'competitor' to sIFR, so take this as you wish.

Related Solutions

Html – How to add some non-standard font to a website

This could be done via CSS:

<style type="text/css">
@font-face {
    font-family: "My Custom Font";
    src: url(http://www.example.org/mycustomfont.ttf) format("truetype");
}
p.customfont { 
    font-family: "My Custom Font", Verdana, Tahoma;
}
</style>
<p class="customfont">Hello world!</p>

It is supported for all of the regular browsers if you use TrueType-Fonts (TTF), the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) or Embedded Opentype (EOT).

Ios – embed a custom font in an iPhone application

iOS 3.2 and later support this. Straight from the What's New in iPhone OS 3.2 doc:

Custom Font Support
Applications that want to use custom fonts can now include those fonts in their application bundle and register those fonts with the system by including the UIAppFonts key in their Info.plist file. The value of this key is an array of strings identifying the font files in the application’s bundle. When the system sees the key, it loads the specified fonts and makes them available to the application.

Once the fonts have been set in the Info.plist, you can use your custom fonts as any other font in IB or programatically.

There is an ongoing thread on Apple Developer Forums:
https://devforums.apple.com/thread/37824 (login required)

And here's an excellent and simple 3 steps tutorial on how to achieve this (broken link removed)

Add your custom font files into your project using Xcode as a resource
Add a key to your Info.plist file called UIAppFonts.
Make this key an array
For each font you have, enter the full name of your font file (including the extension) as items to the UIAppFonts array
Save Info.plist
Now in your application you can simply call [UIFont fontWithName:@"CustomFontName" size:12] to get the custom font to use with your UILabels and UITextViews, etc…

Also: Make sure the fonts are in your Copy Bundle Resources.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Html – How to add some non-standard font to a website

Ios – embed a custom font in an iPhone application

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