Fonts are incredible tools for designers. A font is just like every other visual
tool out there in that it has the capacity to: spark an emotion, carry a
message, or be so well emerged with its surroundings that its aesthetics are
easily overlooked. There are
literally thousands of fonts for a designer to choose from, but it is believed
there is only one true font to fit a specific need within a project. Picking that font can be a huge task, especially
if you’re lost in the sea of downloaded fonts, but implementing that font on
the web should be hassle free.
If you’re a developer, I’m sure you have already discovered
that a custom font coded via the @font-face tag doesn’t always work across
every browser. The problem is that each browser supports different
fonts. For example, Internet
Explorer and Mozilla Firefox do not support SVG fonts. And mobile support is a different
story.
To combat this problem, it is as simple as referencing every
font file type for the font you want to use. However, getting every file type is not so easy.
Font Squirrel’s tool takes away the painful task of finding
every file type for a font by converting one file type into four. To use the tool, the user must own the
font they want to use and make sure that it is legal for the font to be used on
a personal level. Sites like Font
Squirrel or dafont provide fonts to download and they usually provide the
license and rights information.
Once you have cleared your font for use, you may upload the font and
Font Squirrel will convert the font to four formats: .eot (Embedded OpenType),
.svg (Scalable Vector Graphic), .ttf (TrueType), and .woff (Web Open Font
Format).
The process is very nifty, but don’t go writing code just
yet. Font Squirrel also provides
the lengthy bit of code to use in order to get the fonts to show up on the web.
Font Squirrel’s Webfont Generator provides an incredible service at no cost. That’s right: it’s free. So go ahead and give it a try. This tool really excels when you have several fonts that you want to use across your project; it saves a lot of time. I recently used the tool for one of my projects and it couldn't have been easier.
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