Web fonts for fine quality online typography

The conversion from print to web font files, when done in a responsible way, is quite labor intensive. This is why we can not just yet offer our entire retail library as web type. The good news is that instead we are offering you all our fonts made to order. In other words, if you place an order for a web font, we will convert your order from print to web format at no added cost to you other than the price for an embedding license. That way our web font library is growing as we go, one font at the time with every order filled.

We charge the same price for the web type version of a font as for a single user print license for the same font. When you order both print and web fonts together, you will receive a significant discount: We will knock off 50% of the web font's price. Read more on pricing in our support section or just give us a call.

Web fonts have to perform in a completely new environment that most fonts were simply not created for. The conversion of our retail library from OpenType to the web font formats EOT and WOFF is in fact a shift of the intended medium from print to the monitor. The subtle curves drawn for print now are forced upon a coarse pixel grid. While a few monitors already offer very high resolutions, most notably the iPhone's retina display, the majority of computer screens still roughly clock in at around 100ppi (±10%), which is quite a challenge for fonts, especially in small sizes. So type designers are scrambling to fine tune the appearance of their typefaces specifically for very low resolution devices.

The performance of a typeface in any given medium can be measured along two parameters: Its legibility and how closely it manages to resemble the original type design. A font that looks on screen just like in print but can't be deciphered is doing equally poorly as a font that is very legible but on screen looks nothing like it does in print. The unfortunate truth is that the lower the resolution gets, the more these two criteria will be at odds.

The quality of the look of type is relatively consistent throughout all Apple products and while the edges of the individual letters might seem slightly blurred, the overall impression is as close to the printed image of the same letter as possible. There isn't even very much a type designer can do to improve this appearance short of redrawing the font's outlines.

On Windows PCs however, the pixel image that is rendered from the outlines of the letters in a font looks dramatically different. Different from print but also different from the same typeface's appearance on an Apple computer, and most Windows users actually prefer it that way. This means, that the quality improvements mentioned earlier are really only for this group of our customers. Fonts just need a little more attention to render well on Windows computers. If this extra step in the production work is omitted, the resulting look will be disastrous, and that is not even typographic hyperbole.

The most basic way to optimize a font for screen rending under Windows is a quick and dirty solution for most fonts but entirely appropriate for display fonts with very rough outlines like the JC Bubblejet on Steroids.

This is the most desirable solution for current Windows technology. When you order one of our fonts as a web font, we will convert the outlines and hint the font manually. This is a labor-intensive process that takes several days but the difference in quality is well worth the wait.

This is where the strategy mentioned above comes in: If you place an order for a web font, we will convert your order from print to web format at no added cost to you other than the price for an embedding license. That way our web font library is growing as we go, one font at the time with every order filled.

After you purchase a license and download the web font, you will be free to install it on as many domains as you please. There is no limit to the traffic your website experiences and no pay-as-you-go scheme. As long as the domain the font is hosted on, as well as the domain the font is embedded on, are registered in your name, there is no limit to the use you will get out of it. When one of these two domains changes hands, the new owner will be required to purchase her own license directly from us or from one of our distributors. Our fonts can not legally be opened, altered or converted to different formats. Read here the Web Embedding License…

If you are technically inclined and aim to understand the ins and outs of rasterization you should check out Beat Stamm’s http://rastertragedy.com