Google @font-face and you’ll be hit with thousands of results, articles explaining how to use it and the great flexibility this CSS 3 property introduces to designers moving into the future. Dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that while @font-face is incredibly useful for designers, it is ultimately flawed and doomed for failure in its current form.
For a full and frank summary of the debate so far take a look at this round-up on w3.org. Said round-up is dated as being written in 2008 but the information it contains is still relevant up to the very second of writing this article.
As it stands Firefox, Safari and shortly Opera support @font-face and this allows you to embed otf and ttf files within your stylesheets and pages with relative ease, see webfonts.info for a good guide on this. Internet Explorer have allowed font embedding from IE in versions as early as IE 4 but here’s the problem, embedding in IE must be done using a proprietary Microsoft file format known as eot.
This is where the frustration starts because Microsoft make it practically impossible for you to create these files. They have software that is supposed to convert .ttf (note no .otf support) font files to .eot but guess what it’s completely unusable – to the point where I wouldn’t even link to the software to save anyone else trying to use it.
Now the idea behind Microsoft’s eot format is incredibly sensible, they are in effect putting the type foundry first. EOT is designed to provide as much protection as possible for font creators, something that undeniably @font-face doesn’t.
In short there isn’t a solution and unfortunately it doesn’t look as though there will be one anytime soon.
Your options as a designer are to use @font-face as a perk for visitors with modern browsers and risk licensing issues with various fonts or continue to use a current font replacement technique such as sIFR which again has its pros and cons.
Finally another option that may be available very soon and I’m increasingly encouraged and worried by at the same time is the ‘font as a service’ option, take a look at this great article on the subject from Elliot Jay Stocks for more information.
The positives to be taken from all this hoopla is that at least now we are talking about web fonts and everyone is listening. Everybody in there own way is now trying to find a solution to the problem of web fonts and that can only be a good thing.
Whether it is @font-face, eot or some other type of open embedding, font as a service or a more intelligent replacement technique I get the feeling we are closer to improved web typography now more than ever.
