Web Fonts, now more compressed
By Raph Levien, Engineer, Google Web FontsOne of Google’s core principles is that "fast is better than slow", and the Web Fonts
team takes that to heart. We’re always looking for ways to make web fonts load faster, and
that’s doubtless a key factor in
our
rapid user adoption. Today, 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 Web Fonts now
implements Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format, which yields an
approximate 15% savings in file size over using gzip alone. This change will automatically
speed up Google Web Fonts for Internet Explorer browsers (version 6 and up). We’re also
actively working to offer improved compression with other modern browsers, including Google
Chrome.
We’ve kept the interface simple, so designers don’t need to
update their integrations in any way — we’ll automatically upgrade the CSS snippet and font
files so that site designers and visitors get their fonts faster. We’ve done this for
previous speed optimizations as
well, such as automatically stripping the hints (metadata used for improving rendering quality
on Windows) when serving fonts to Mac, iOS, and Android clients. We expect that most future
optimizations will also be automatic and transparent.
Monotype Imaging
has agreed to make
MicroType Express
available to the public at no cost; the license can be found at
monotypeimaging.com/aboutus/mtx-license.
We believe it’s friendly to both open source and proprietary implementations.
Today, we are also releasing an implementation of MicroType Express
compression as part of the Embedded OpenType converter in the open-source
sfntly library, adding to the existing
WOFF compression. 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.
We are proud to be working with Monotype Imaging, and we look
forward to learning more from designers, users, sites and other partners to advance the state
of web fonts together!
Raph Levien is an expert
on fonts and graphics technologies. Raph designed Inconsolata, one of
the fonts available on the Web Font API. Raph enjoys photography and spending time with his
family.Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
