DesignByNumbers

The Web and Fonts

While fonts are a common and important element of design, translating that concept to the web can sometimes be a challenge. As the web has always had poor font support, there have been a number of ways to work around this. Common solutions are to generate an image using the font, such as with PHP’s GD library or rending a Flash shockwave movie with the font. The problem is that many of these solutions require a specific font format.

While the design world has moved on to the more flexible OpenType format, much of the programming world is using tools that rely on TrueType. Even graphics software giant Adobe has been slow to adopt OpenType in all of its applications, such as Flash CS3 which still only supports TrueType and Type 1.

Enter Font Conversion

There are a number of font creation and conversion products on the market. Twelve years ago, Macromedia had a program called Fontographer which did a great job while it was under active development. That was essentially what we were looking for: a basic program that could edit fonts and export them in a large variety of formats, preferably open-source.

FontForge is a pretty close match to what we wanted. The problem is that it is built to run under unix. They have a package that can run under Windows but requires the Cygwin emulation layer. This is large and overly-complex install with many options – not really suitable for one occasional use tool.

We decided to install it on a Ubuntu virtual machine that we run using VMWare Player. In addition to saving the overhead of running this on our Windows-based production machines, it is a much easier install on Ubuntu. It was as easy as choosing System->Synaptic Package Manager, searching for fontforge, and marking it for installation. All the prerequisites get installed automatically. The application itself can be found under Applications->Graphics->FontForge.

Converting The Font

Converting the font was pretty simple. It was just a matter of opening a known font type, selecting File->Generate Font, and saving the font in the desired format, in our case, TrueType. Each member of the font family has to be converted separately, so it’s not a good application for batch conversion. However, our needs were very specific and we just needed the one font.

Noah

Noah believes that most of the world's problems can be solved with a level head and good software. Though experienced with a number of programming languages, he leans towards opensource because of his belief that knowledge and the tools to express oneself creatively should be freely accessible to everyone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under DesignbyNumbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.