Mozilla today announced the adoption of an open font specification “Web Open Font Format” (WOFF), and will be Firefox 3.6 and future versions to provide support. Firefox 3.5 already supports TrueType, OpenType font format of the two. WOFF by the font designer Erik van Blockland, Tal Leming, and Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew presided over the design, can be seen as TT, OT two kinds of font data, a simple re-packaging, but the built-in compression, and therefore smaller, easy to download and dissemination (eg, two 3.1MB, 172KB of the TTF font file format to use WOFF only 1MB, and 80KB), also supports meta-data, so vendors can add the fonts in their relevant identifying information. Complete specification can be found here.

Firefox 3.6 will be the first one officially supported browser WOFF font formats, but due to the slow pace of development, Mozilla has not released Beta test version. The technology could be of interest to try this Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 Preview Developer Preview Edition, has joined the WOFF technology.

WOFF Font Application Examples:

Browser Support

Mix a variety of formats

Use Postscript CFF fonts

Use Postscript CFF fonts

African languages show

Japanese Example