Font Embedding and Cascading Style Sheets

Font Embedding

The 4.0 versions of popular Internet browsers (Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer) seem to offer a solution to a cross-platform font appearance problem through supporting some variations of font embedding, the technique that enabled Web developers to improve the typographic quality of their Web pages by publishing not only the Web page, but also the fonts needed to view the page (Levine, 2000, p. 721).

When fonts are embedded within the Web Page a Web developer does not need to worry about whether or not the end user has the font installed on his or her computer system; the fonts will be downloaded from the Web server.

Both major Internet browser vendors have developed their own versions of downloadable (embedded) fonts.

Microsoft's implementation of font embedding enabled embedded fonts to be efficiently compressed, subranged (only characters used on the page are included), and protected from unauthorized distribution. However, according to Levine (2000), "Internet Explorer relies heavily on the font display services of the operating system, thereby damaging portability" (p. 721).

Netscape's solution based on the Bitstream's TrueDoc technology, on the other hand, is more portable because the browser itself takes complete care of the display (Levine, 2000, p. 721). According to Snell (1995), the TrueDoc technology provided Web developers the capability of including non-Latin characters in Web pages by encoding "character shape information in one compact Portable Font Resource (PFR) file, to create a prototype Web browser that lets electronic publishers use any fonts they want to in their documents" (p. 92).

The greatest disadvantage of font embedding technology, however, is the fact that embedded fonts significantly add to the file size of an HTML document in which they are embedded. That leads to slower downloading time especially for Internet users who use dial-up modems.

Cascading Style Sheets

CSS2 is an alternative solution to the font embedding.

The solution implemented in CSS2 provided precise typographic control in HTML through detailed description, intelligent matching, and format-independent downloading of fonts. According to the official information from the W3C (1998) Web site, CSS2 is defined as: "a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications)" (par. 1). Also, CSS2 supports downloadable fonts and significantly simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance by separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents (W3C, 1998, par 2).


The greatest advancement that CSS2 solution has brought to Web developers was that browsers were enabled to offer choice of one of the four ways to select fonts for the presentation of HTML elements:

  1. Exact matching of the font specified in the style sheet with one of the fonts installed in the system.
  2. Intelligent matching of the specified font with a similar but different system font, if an exact match is unavailable.
  3. Downloading of the font file over the network, if the two previous options are unavailable and if the font's URL is specified.
  4. Font Synthesis to create necessary fonts on the fly based on the style sheet's font description. Some user agents [Internet browsers] may perform font synthesis only as a last resort. (Levine, 2000, p. 722).

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References:

Levine, J. R. (2000). Internet Secrets®. 2nd Ed. Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.

Snell, J. (1995, Jun). Looking good on the Internet: fonts on the Web. MacUser: 11, 6, 92.

W3C. (1998, May 12). Cascading Style Sheets, level 2: CSS2 specification. MIT,
Cambridge, MA. Retrieved on June 19, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/

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