- From: Laurence Penney <lorp@lorp.org>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:29:24 +0100
- To: www-font <www-font@w3.org>
It seems to me the benefits of Monotype's Microtype Express compression are being oversold. Until recently I was under the impression that its patented font-specific algorithms performed significantly better than normal compression. But then I actually ran some tests, comparing WEFT compression and gzip compression: Georgia Vera Sans Mono TTF 155068 49224 EOT (ttf2eot[1]) 155234 49454 EOT (WEFT) 73907 24113 TTF (gzip) 97965 27971 EOT (ttf2eot+gzip) 98013 28038 EOT (WEFT+gzip) 73920 24058 This demonstrates first of all that the zip compression of Tal & Erik's .webfont proposal is almost as good as the dedicated MTX method. But more interestingly, gzip compression is built into both browsers and Apache[2]. For example, this webfont demo page, hosted at cheap shared hosting company, is serving compressed TTF and EOT as well as compressed HTML: http://www.lorp.org/webfont/ While HTML is often compressed by default, a single line in Apache 'SetOutputFilter DEFLATE' compresses all served files (though of course in practice this would be better done on a per-filetype basis). (By the way, another Apache line 'RewriteRule ^(.*)\.ttf$ /webfont/ $1.eot [L]' allows the @font-face CSS in that demo page to be the same for IE and non-IE browsers, referring always to .ttf files.) For the record, of about a dozen websites I checked using GIDZipTest[3], these were the only ones serving uncompressed data: www.monotypeimaging.com www.ascendercorp.com www.w3c.org www.tiro.com - L [1] http://code.google.com/p/ttf2eot/ [2] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html [3] http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 15:30:04 UTC