Over the last two weeks browsers and fonts have been on my mind. Two weeks ago I discussed the problems of font rendering in browsers and how the free Cufon font rendering system works and then I covered how the @font-face directive in Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) solves the font rendering problem with standards-based approach.
This week I have a standards-based commercial offering for font rendering that moves the solution squarely into the professional world. The offering is Fonts.com Web Fonts published by Monotype Imaging, one of the traditional 800 pound gorillas of the font business.
What Monotype has created is a very simple system that allows you to use any of the 7,500 typefaces they offer on your own Web site and do with complete observance of copyrights.
There are several other advantages to the fonts.com system: To start with, all of the typefaces they make available are ready to use on the Web and with the professional subscriptions you can download fonts for desktop use which speeds up design workflow (for example, so that you can use the fonts in Photoshop mockups).
Best of all, the fonts.com solution takes all of the complexity out of deploying typefaces on the Web – you simply choose your fonts, select the CSS elements the fonts will be applied to, and then add a line of JavaScript to your Web pages, and voila! Your Web site is really designed!
The JavaScript is a simple loader that downloads the fonts and style sheets specifications you generate on the fonts.com Web site. The service also provides guidance on how to use the fonts with your own style sheets and, for paid-for subscriptions, there are deployment options that avoid using JavaScript.
The fonts.com system also supports subsetting so that you can optimize the typeface subsets (for example, numeric and special characters) as well as localized typefaces (currently Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari fonts are supported) so that your Web site font support has as little impact as possible on your site performance.
Fonts.com system offers three pricing tiers: Free, which allows for 25,000 page views per month (essentially Web font downloads) using any of more than 2,000 available fonts, on unlimited sites, and without a fonts.com badge being required on the target Web page until 2011.
The Standard subscription is an upgrade to the Free subscription and starts at $10 per month for 250,000 page views (each doubling of page views doubles the price). It provides more than 7,000 fonts and will never require a fonts.com badge.
The Professional subscription costs $100 per month for 2,500,000 page views (like the Standard subscription each doubling of page views doubles the price) and allows the download of fonts to the desktop.
If you’re looking for a solution that ensures that typefaces are rendered correctly on your Web site, the fonts.com solution is definitely worth considering.
