Re: Webfont compression

IMO, the main benefit of MTX is not that it is much more compressed
than anything else (as you say, it isn't), but that it is the only
in-font compression scheme that is compatible with the existing
installed base of IE.

The main drawback of EOT Lite as currently constituted is that it has
no native compression. EOT Lite with MTX would be highly preferable, I
think.

Regards,

T

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Laurence Penney<lorp@lorp.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>



-- 
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
- Sir Winston Churchill

Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 16:06:12 UTC