Talk:Web Open Font Format

Untitled
And here I thought there would be some discussion. ¦ Reisio (talk) 15:45, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion: Browser support table
A table showing which versions (say, the left axis) of which browsers (say, labeled on the top axis) support WOFF would be helpful and very easy to find and absorb as a reader. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.50.8.11 (talk) 02:03, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * sry, but for what? in the text there is explaining which versions of browsers does support woff! mabdul 11:40, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Comparison of layout engines (Web Typography) already has such a table. I'm linking to it from the article. --Gyrobo (talk) 13:47, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

The mention of Internet Explorer 9 should probably be updated now that it's officially released (WOFF support is now in IE9 release vs the mention about the platform preview 3 build). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.205.104.121 (talk) 19:36, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Vendor support out-of-date
The text in vendor support is out-of-date. All current versions of desktop browsers now support WOFF, including Internet Explorer and Safari.58.96.101.86 (talk) 23:54, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Updated and removed the template. Please replace my FileHippo.com reference if find more authoritive changelog for Safari. &mdash; Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:04, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Worth updating for mobile. The iPhone originally used fonts in SVG only, and then TrueType support was added.  Not sure about WOFF.  --John Nagle (talk) 20:00, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Removing "Capturing webfonts" section
I'm removing this section for the following reasons: --Gyrobo (talk) 19:12, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Completely unsourced.
 * 2) The "often with cryptic alphanumeric names" most likely refers to the manner in which some font foundries (such as Monotype's fonts.com service) obfuscate their font file names. This has nothing to do with the format.
 * 3) The section goes from a how-to guide to a discussion of the featuresets on font foundries' websites. Again, nothing to do with WOFF.

Why we need to reference the original WOFF and WOFF2 conversion code
I just did a Google search for “WOFF conversion code”. This is what I get on the first page of results:


 * https://everythingfonts.com/ttf-to-woff Requires paid registration to convert any reasonably sized font; has no link to the reference code
 * https://everythingfonts.com/woff-to-ttf Again, asking for paid registration to use something which the free reference offers without size limitations
 * https://everythingfonts.com/otf-to-woff These guys do a good job of Google bombing
 * https://andrewsun.com/tools/woffer-woff-font-converter/ While this Javascript conversion code is open-source, there is no link to the faster C conversion code
 * https://onlinefontconverter.com/ Only the website source code is linked to; there is no link to the actual converter
 * http://www.font2web.com/ Again, no reference code
 * http://superuser.com/questions/192146/converting-from-woffweb-open-font-format Finally, a page that links to the reference code
 * https://font-converter.net/en Again, no link to reference code
 * http://www.files-conversion.com/font/woff There’s a pattern of not letting people know how to get the code to convert it themselves
 * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9017922/how-to-convert-woff-to-ttf-otf-via-command-line None of the answers here link to the reference WOFF conversion reference code

Note that there is not a link to the actual original sfnt2woff converter or woff2sfnt converter when doing a basic Google search. This is a useful piece of code to have, and since the online conversion tools with inline ads or paid membership have saturated the Google search results, it’s good to counter that by discussing and linking to the actual free open source reference code. Samboy (talk) 16:08, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. Here are some links:


 * The Mozilla page from Jonathan Kew appears to be dead: http://people.mozilla.org/~jkew/woff/ (| web archivedoes not have the zip file with the source code), a clone of the code seems to exist here: https://github.com/wget/sfnt2woff --Kramred (talk) 13:30, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Use and reception
A humble user might expect that it would be easy to This article doesn't discuss how a user gets to use such a font, let alone install it.
 * install a WOFF or WOFF 2.0 font into their common operating system, e.g. Windows or OS/X;
 * display such a font with e.g. Font Viewer; or
 * select it for office tasks, such as word-processing or web-page creation & maintenance.

Nor is it clear whether, if one's browser successfully displays a web page that uses such a font, the font is thereby downloaded to or saved on one's device (PC, phone, tablet etc.) and thus available for future use, either cached or as non-hidden font files in a Fonts folder.

Another glaring omission is the extent to which modern browsers use the WOFF formats in preference to others, e.g. uncompressed TTF and OTF. A section headed "Reception" discussing this might be useful. Were the inventors successful in reaching their aims? yoyo (talk) 04:34, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * WOFF font files are normally installed on a Web host server, not a client machine. The whole point of WOFF is to provide fonts on Web pages that may or may not be present on client machines.  WOFF font files were never intended to be used with locally-installed programs.  As such, the client machine will probably never see the entire font, just the subset of characters that are being used in the Web page, so even if it were possible, displaying such a font in a font viewer wouldn't reveal much.174.85.100.143 (talk) 21:52, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Font mangling/obfuscation
I've noticed a few fonts I've found lately appear to have different "versions" for web use, generic office use, and print production use. Upon inspection of the "web" versions, you can see what I would only describe as "mangling" of the font (straight lines, or single curves even, have extra points inserted that, at web resolutions are not really visible, but once you scale the font to a larger size (for example if you were doing a full sheet of paper with the word "Hello") become glaringly obvious). I'm thinking this phenomenon deserves a notation (either here, or perhaps at Font, or both). If anyone is aware of any sources that cover this practice, I'd appreciate a pointer/link. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 19:53, 19 June 2021 (UTC)