14 DAY TRIAL // Web Fonts open up a lot of possibilities for website designers, but they also add some hassle. True to their name, web fonts have to be downloaded by the visitor just like any other page resource. Font files are small, but that doesn't mean that they can't be smaller.
Google has announced that it is now using a new compression method for the fonts in its Google Web Fonts library. The new method should result in an improvement in download speed for Internet Explorer users and will eventually benefit other browsers as well.
"We are announcing a new way to make web fonts smaller and faster, in collaboration with the Monotype Imaging Fonts.com Web Fonts team," Google's Raph Levien announced.
"Google Web Fonts now implements Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format, which yields an approximate 15% savings in file size over using gzip alone," he wrote.
Websites that use web fonts from Google don't have to do anything to benefit from the change, the fonts used are automatically updated and upgraded.
This is not the first such update that Google was able to implement without interrupting normal operations or having designers change the existing code.
Google has also announced that Monotype Imaging is making its MicroType Express font format available to anyone for free.
Google has already implemented the new compression method in the Embedded OpenType converter part of its sfntly library, alongside the existing WOFF compression method.
"The sfntly library, developed by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, serves as the core conversion engine in Google Web Fonts for subsetting, hint stripping, and related functions of our dynamic serving path. We hope that all web font services, as well as people hosting their own web fonts, will use sfntly to optimize font serving across the web," Google described the sfntly library, which has been open sourced and made available to the public recently.