Introduction

Typography on the Web

Introduction

Microsoft has put considerable effort into solving the problems involved in international typography, document portability and displaying fonts on the screen.
The benefits of this work can be seen in the international TrueType fonts supplied with Windows 95, the font smoothing feature included with the Windows 95 Plus! pack, and the font embedding technology supported by Microsoft Office applications.
Microsoft Internet Explorer allows Web site designers to specify which TrueType fonts should be used to display their pages. Microsoft is now working on bringing a set of core fonts optimized for screen display to the World Wide Web. For the first time, designers and users running Microsoft Internet Explorer or other font enhanced browsers can rely on these Web fonts to view Web pages exactly as they were intended to be seen.

Summary
The last thing the world needs is yet another font format for the World Wide Web, especially since one exists today which is already available on the vast majority of Web clients, could easily be made to run on all systems, has had hundreds of man-years of development, was specifically designed for high-quality screen display, and in which thousands of typefaces have already been produced to support a huge range of languages from English and Cyrillic to Japanese, Thai, Simplified Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew.
    TrueType. It already ships on every single Windows and Macintosh computer, and will appear on other systems.
    TrueType was designed from the outset for high-quality screen display, and can be hinted to give screen text of unsurpassed quality. A core set of fonts already ships on every single Macintosh and Windows machine, and this core set could be easily extended. Under Windows, TrueType can be anti-aliased "on the fly", giving all the visual benefits of anti-aliased bitmaps without sacrificing the portability, editability and other advantages of keeping content in raw HTML text.
    TrueType is an outline format, already well-understood by all of the font manufacturers, and thus resolution-independent and infinitely scalable. It carries no royalty to either Microsoft or Apple.
    It is easily embeddable in documents, while still protecting the Intellectual Property Rights of the font vendor. The embedding process was agreed by all the major font vendors in 1992 at a Windows Open Services Architecture (WOSA) review, and gives four levels of embedding: read-only (print & preview), editable, fully installable and do not embed. Fully installable allows fonts to be distributed and installed freely when required. This functionality exists on both Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh today. Development work is part of our cross-platform development strategy for our own applications such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Microsoft will license TrueType to developers of other platforms as well.
    Fonts are rapidly becoming one of the hottest topics on the Web. As Web page design becomes more and more like the design of conventional magazine pages, designers want to have the same level of access to fonts as they have today for print publishing.
    A great deal of disinformation is being disseminated by groups and companies whose agenda is to push their own products.
    Issues have been raised regarding portability of documents and fonts, rendering at screen resolutions, character encoding, anti-aliasing, and more. Fortunately, the font industry has already developed and standardized solutions addressing many of these issues.
    Microsoft believes that the logical choice for a font format for the Web is TrueType, for the following reasons:

It is a scalable outline font format that allows screen rendition and printing at any size.
It was designed from the outset for better screen readability, and can be hinted to give superior screen quality at the low resolution of monitors.
Thousands of fonts already exist in the marketplace, including core fonts on both Windows and Macintosh in a huge number of languages, and many of them have been hinted for excellent screen quality.
The tools and expertise needed to make it are already in place in the font industry.
It is free of royalties to either Microsoft or Apple.
Technologies for embedding fonts within documents already exist and can be extended to cover Web documents.

With a minimum amount of development work, TrueType can support all Web authoring/browsing needs.

Future developments
As part of Microsoft's commitment to the Internet, we plan to:

Assemble a set of high-quality multiple-language, Web Fonts.
Work with browser manufacturers and Operating System vendors to help implement TrueType on Unix browsers in addition to the current Macintosh and Windows platforms.
Continue to develop solutions for font embedding, compression etc. in collaboration with font vendors, operating systems manufacturers, and Independent Software Vendors.

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