UnderstandingFontEmbedding

Note that this page is connected to the article Understanding Font Embedding on Vector, the APL magazine of the British APL association. Everything that is subject to changes is on this page on the APL Wiki, and it 's going to be updated whenever needed.

Converting a TTF font into EOT

In order to use the "APL385 Unicode" fonts for font embedding in IE we need to convert this font into an EOT file. Now if you are interested in how to do this, here are the details hide the details

There is a tool available from Microsoft called WEFT that theoretically allows us to do this, but unfortunately IE won't use the resulting EOT file. The reasons are unknown.

However, there is a tool available that can create an EOT file that is used by IE8. Originally it was a UNIX/LINUX project:

http://code.google.com/p/ttf2eot/

This tool has a disadvantage: it does not allow us to bind the EOT-file to a particular URL. In our case, however, it doesn't matter as we will see.

The syntax to convert any font is easy; given you are in a directory where the exe as well as the font to be converted is located:

  ttf2eot.exe OLD-FONT.ttf NEW-FONT.eot

But you don't have to: Instead you can download a zipped version of the EOT file from this page, see the "Downloads" section at the very end of the page.

Web server issues

Any EOT file is supposed to come with a particular URL inside the file: IE won't accept a font which got downloaded from elsewhere. Fortunately, IE does accept an EOT file that does not have any URL specified. This is important for the APL Wiki since we cannot download the font from
http://aplwiki.com/apl385 Unicode.eot
because this URL would be processed by the wiki software (MoinMoin) and therefore result in a "Page not found".

But Apache, the web server used for the APL Wiki, won't deliver the font from another domain with it's default configuration. To change that you must include this into your Apache configuration file (httpd.conf):

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

This decreases the safety of the web site marginally.

I have no experiences with IIS.

Downloads

apl385.eot.zip (The "APL385 Unicode" font as EOT file; needed for IE)
apl385.ttf.zip (The "APL385 Unicode" font as TTF file; needed for IE)
fontface.zip (Sample CSS which should work with all modern browsers)

Author: KaiJaeger

Updated: 2010-02-21

CategoryUnicode