14 DAY TRIAL // The makers of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera have worked together to produce WOFF (Web Open Font Format), and to submit the 1.0 specification to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Published on April 19, the WOFF File Format 1.0 specification represents a key step forward in terms of standardizing a web font format. Essentially, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and additional companies share the same perspective over a common encoding format for web fonts. WOFF is, in this sense, also a critical evolution as far as browser compatibility is concerned, developed as an open, compressed encoding for sfnt-based font resources, according to Sylvain Galineau, IE program manager.
The WOFF font format “was designed to provide lightweight, easy-to-implement compression of the font data, suitable for use in conjunction with the @font-face CSS declaration. Any TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format file can be losslessly converted to WOFF for Web use (subject to licensing of the font data); once decoded by a user agent, the WOFF font will display identically to the original desktop font from which it was created,” an excerpt from the WOFF File Format 1.0 W3C Member Submission reads.
According to Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WOFF has not been put together as a replacement of TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts. However, the trio emphasized that WOFF was meant as an alternative to the font formats enumerated above, in scenarios in which it would deliver superior performance or better licensing options.
“The WOFF format also allows additional metadata to be attached to the file; this can be used by font designers or vendors to include licensing or other information, beyond that present in the original font. Such metadata does not affect the rendering of the font in any way, but may be displayed to the user on request,” it is added in the W3C submission.
Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera all offered W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license to build upon, copy, publish and distribute WOFF under the W3C document licenses.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).
Firefox 3.6.3 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.
The latest release of Opera 10.50 is available for download here.