Uncle Travelling Matt .com — the personal site of Matt Gifford

I’m currently working on a web project that makes use of the new Vista/Office 2007 fonts, and font embedding. The embedding works like a PDF in that the fonts go along with the document, so if the user’s system doesn’t have them installed, the page still displays as intended. Font embedding is currently microsoft/internet explorer only technology, however Safari has just starting supporting font linking. So between these two browsers I’ve got everyone covered, as this particular site’s users generally use the system default browser, IE on Windows and Safari on Mac.

There’s a few gotcha’s with Microsoft WEFT eot creation tool through. Obviously since it subsets you need to make sure all the letters you intend to use are on the page(s), and also it doesn’t parse the css properly, so things like “text-transform: uppercase” are ignored and potentially needed characters left out. Also the @font-face need to come as the first thing in the document, prior to the main style sheet for them to work reliably it seems. It’s finickiness aside, I actually like the microsoft system, mainly because the subsetting and compression makes the embedded versions of the fonts makes much smaller, so the initial page load times are better on an empty cache.

An interesting idea I came across today, from the Yahoo site….

Anticipated preload – preload in advance before launching a redesign. It often happens after a redesign that you hear: “The new site is cool, but it’s slower than before”. Part of the problem could be that the users were visiting your old site with a full cache, but the new one is always an empty cache experience. You can mitigate this side effect by preloading some components before you even launched the redesign. Your old site can use the time the browser is idle and request images and scripts that will be used by the new site.