To celebrate my blog reaching 100 published posts, I decided to buy it a new font. After researching font creation for a couple of days, I decided that it was all too complicated and sought professional help: Fontifier is a web service that takes the pain (and believe me it is a pain) out of making a font. For the princely sum of 9 US dollars and 10 minutes effort you too can have a reasonable looking typeface.
The font I got back after uploading my sample sheet was OK, but I wasn’t happy with some of the letterform and the kerning was not very good. Enter FontForge, an open-source font editor. Although a little buggy and a lot hideous, FontForge let me fix up the problems without too much trouble.
And now for a rant about embedded fonts: I see today that Microsoft is trying to resurrect their EOT font embedding technology. This was the next big thing 10 years ago – a way for the browsers to download custom fonts for display while supposedly protecting the font from being pirated. What it is in practice is a non-standard font format that is a pain in the neck for legitimate users and no hinderance to the fiendish font-pirates at all. Everybody saw this 10 years ago, which is why you have never seen a page with embedded EOT fonts even though the technology has been around for a decade – nobody can be bothered.
The upshot is that IE8 will not support standard OpenType fonts in stylesheets. This is terrible news – if you are viewing this page using Safari on the Mac then you are seeing text rendered in my handwriting. This is purely decorative (it is so, shut up!) but I can think of several more practical reasons why a page may want to embed a custom font – think mathematical equations or hieroglyphs. With two completely non-compatible font formats, few authors are going to make the effort, and everybody loses.