A new website dedicated to the issues of font software usage, technology and licensing, http://www.FontEmbedding.com , has been announced by a leading provider of advanced font products, Ascender Corporation. During a panel session on Web Fonts and Font Embedding at TypeCon 2008 held in Buffalo, New York was made the announcement.

Including IT administrators, web developers, type designers, and software developers, the FontEmbedding.com website is intended to be an educational resource and a forum for everyone that designs, develops or uses fonts. The website features a variety of articles on font usage, licensing & font technology, font embedding tools and a blog to spur discussion on these topics.

Font embedding is a technique that provides viewers of documents with the ability to see the fonts which the author used on to design the original document. The first embedded fonts were truly embedded in a document - they were not external resources but rather included inside the document. Now, there are ways to let web designers post fonts to a web site that can be downloaded along with web pages with web pages there. However, as part of the basic font workstation license, commercial fonts from Ascender Corp and many other commercial font vendors do not allow fonts to be posted to servers.

For providing non-standard font styles on web pages, there are currently three viable methods:

    * sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)
    * Font Linking (such as featured in the new Safari 3.1 browser)
    * Embedded OpenType (EOT)


Each method provides richer font choices for web pages, but only EOT, such as supported by Internet Explorer, works in conjunction with the embedding permissions encoded within fonts by type designers. To generate EOT files, Ascender has developed a prototype web-based utility, and is premiering this utility on the FontEmbedding.com website.