The ready-to-use technology debuted this week at the TypeCom conference here and allows designers to impart an old style to text with an appropriate web-friendly font.
According to reports,WOFF has been embraced by browser makers, standards groups, typography designers and online services to ease licensing.
WOFF grew out of cooperation among Erik van Blokland from type foundry LettError, Tal Leming from type foundry Type Supply and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla.
According to the report, the tech is continuously gaining allies and some final pieces have now fallen into place.
WOFF is also being embraced by a number of providers according to the report, including Apple that has added support to its Safari browser in prototype builds of WebKit.
The four other major browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Explorer and Google's Chrome) already had signed up for WOFF.
Adobe is also on board saying it will offer several Adobe fonts for web use through the TypeKit font subscription service.
The standardization of WOFF for use on browsers and elsewhere is also on track. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first draft of WOFF on July 27.
The acceptance of WOFF is being heralded as a way to help open the Internet to typography that doesn't just use raw “web-safe” fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet) and text, but allows designers to communicate information more graphically as it’s displayed in books, newspapers, magazines and TV.
WOFF isn't the first attempt at improving the web-font challenge. There have been efforts from Explorer’s Embedded OpenType and SVG Fonts, which use the Scalable Vector Graphics standard and are the way to bring typography to the iPad, but neither have achieved broad support.
“Solving the technology matters is one thing. Solving the business ones was another. But WOFF allies managed to attract the support of several type foundries. Among them are Adobe Systems, House Industries, ITC Fonts, Linotype and Monotype,” the report said.
Website operators can pay usage-based subscription fees for WOFF that enable use of a growing range of commercial typefaces.
To see a Mozilla demo of WOFF go here.
