Dynamic Fonts
What an exciting concept !! To be able to supply special fonts within your website so that everyone can view them - even if they don't have that font !! Well, it may not be so exciting . . . read on . . .
A dynamic font is one that any user can view online without it having to be installed on their PC. There are two well-known dynamic font technologies – but with both, the problem is browser compatibility. :
Microsoft WEFT - (Web Embedding Fonts Tool ) – for IE 4.x and up
Bitstream (www.bitstream.com) and their dynamic font website, TrueDoc (www.truedoc.com) – for Netscape 4.x only (or IE but you will have to ask users to download the Bitstream plugin, any many will not).
The Prevailing Wisdom – after years of development, there is still no practical way to do this, since there is not a cross-browser/platform reliable method. Microsoft has WEFT, but it's IE only. Netscape uses Bitstream, but it's Netscape only. The best you can do is to either:
a) use WEFT so that IE users can view your fonts - and let Netscape users see the default font instead
b) even better, don’t use dynamic fonts !!
WEFT 3.2 - http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3
Works with IE 4.x and up, but not with Netscape. However, you can define a secondary, standard font so that Netscape users will be able to at least read the text.
Bitstream Dynamic Fonts
A bad idea from the start. Bitstream “TrueDoc” dynamic fonts were developed for Netscape 4.x - then they created a plugin so that IE users could also see the fonts – users will need to go to www.truedoc.com, and when they first hit that site it will ask you to first download the “Bitstream WebFont Player” Internet Explorer – it is 364kB. Without it, the default fonts are shown. Bad concept – it is only supported natively on Netscape 4.x - so forget about it !!! But here is some info on it anyway . . .
Dynamic fonts include a security technology called DocLock. This technology encodes the Portable Font Resources (PFRs) so that they only work with documents on the web sites you specify. Sure, others can download the files, but they won't be able to install them on their systems. Nor will they be able to use them on their web sites.
www.truedoc.com has pfr’s that sites can link to and display those fonts for free.
www.truedoc.com has a tutorial on how to like to their “pfr” dynamic font files. The user will hit your page and will see the font that you linked to – again, though, he must accept the Bitstream plugin which must be installed in order to view the fonts !!! It also uses a JAVA script file called “tdserver.js”.
CAUTION: think twice about using Bitstream !!! In the first place, as the table below shows – it is not supported on Netscape 7 or 7, and not at all on Mac’s. Also it looks like AOL (Netscape) and Microsoft are going to give Bitstream the heave-ho and not support their technology on future browser versions. Here is a statement on Bitstream’s site that makes me think that:
“Unfortunately, we do not build the browsers, nor can we control how they handle fonts, so we can no longer support WebFont Maker retail products for every release of every browser. We would like to support Netscape Navigator 6 and 7 (and future versions), as well as future versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, but we cannot. Bitstream suggests you contact Microsoft and AOL and encourage them to support dynamic fonts in the new releases of their browsers.”