BANGALORE, INDIA: ‘Font’ is a representative of creative presentation of characters. In fact, ‘Font’ provides life to character representation as being perceived by a graphic artist or designers. Etymology of font too indicates the evolution that it has gone through ever since a type writer was discovered.

During the early nineties, at the time when World Wide Web was making its mark, the type of font available was limited to what was being offered or bundled with a specific browser. The markup or the web styling too was nascent at that point of time. This aspect of enabling choice of selecting a font was introduced as part of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 1.0 & Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) 1.0.

The interesting aspect about font is the journey it has taken in the context of the web. At the time when CSS 1.0 was introduced, there were certain fonts which were termed as web safe fonts. These are the fonts that were present on a wide range of computers and used by web content authors. Web typography is the term associated to web fonts.

The next generation of new fonts that were created was enabled for download. If a font that was mentioned as part of the markup was not present, then an install of the font was initiated, failing which the rendering was done with a fallback/web safe font. This was standardized in CSS 2.0. The fonts were referred to a True Type Fonts (TTF) or Open Type Fonts.

With time, it was realized that as new fonts took birth on the web, it was not practical to enforce installation as and when the same was created by designer & content authors. The need of the hour was to enable a capability to package a font along with a web page, in a manner that is viable to be embedded. In addition, as a standard body, W3C thrives to introduce specifications & define standards for WWW.

This marked the genesis of ‘Web Open Font Format’ abbreviated as WOFF. WOFF is a font format meant to be used in Web pages, and was defined as recently as 2009. The font format, ably supported by Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software ASA & Microsoft, is on its way to becoming an interoperable format supported by all browsers.