How to build woff/web fonts from otf?

Posted by Rolf in

5 Aug 2012 — 2:46am

Hello,

I was wondering which tools are available to create/convert web fonts from OTF (cff) files? I'm on OSX and it could be command line tools as well.
I know there are more than a few sites available that can do it for you, but I'm looking at fonts that I'd like to convert myself and also test with OT features.

I've looked at sfntly from Google but it's still a work in progress and also does not handle OTF/CFF fonts.
There's an (old) tool from JKew (http://people.mozilla.org/~jkew/woff/) but could not test it yet (the pre-compiled version doesn't run atm).

Any ideas or pointers?

Regards,
Rolf

Frode Bo Helland
5 Aug 2012 — 3:05am

Sfntly does indeed handle OTF/CFF fonts.

rhe
5 Aug 2012 — 10:45am

The FontSquirrel @font-face generator is certainly the best free tool around and it also offers a lot of extra options to deal with things like OpenType features: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Frode Bo Helland
5 Aug 2012 — 10:55am

But Fontsquirrel converts OTF/CFF to TTF.

JanekZ
5 Aug 2012 — 11:37am

FontForge

Michel Boyer
5 Aug 2012 — 6:15pm

I ran the following test. I made an otf file without a UniquID (using ttx) that I named unicasem.otf and giving the following trace:

  681 % otfinfo -i unicasem.otf
  Family:              unicase
  Subfamily:           Medium
  Full name:           unicase
  PostScript name:     unicase
  Version:             Version 001.000
  Copyright:           Created by Boyer Michel

and I sent it to the font-face generator to get my "package". In particular I received a ttf file. Here is a trace:

  692 % otfinfo -i unicasem-webfont.ttf
  Family:              unicase
  Subfamily:           Medium
  Full name:           unicase Medium
  PostScript name:     unicase
  Version:             Version 001.000
  Unique ID:           FontForge 2.0 : unicase : 5-8-2012
  Copyright:           Created by Boyer Michel

Note the UniqueID that was put into the font by the fontface generator.

rhe
6 Aug 2012 — 12:33am

But Fontsquirrel converts OTF/CFF to TTF.

So? The original post only mentions creating webfonts from CFF.

Té Rowan
6 Aug 2012 — 6:55am

As I recall, sfnt2woff (the JKew tool) can convert both OTF flavours to WOFF.

Michel Boyer
6 Aug 2012 — 8:14am

the pre-compiled version doesn't run atm

I just tried on my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.6 and had no problem running it. I first right clicked on the link and saved the file sfnt2woff.txt. Then I executed

  mv sfnt2woff.txt sfnt2woff
  chmod 755 sfnt2woff

and put sfnt2woff in my ~/bin directory (which is in my PATH).

Added: I just tried on a Mini and I directly got the file sfnt2woff but still had to use chmod to make it executable.

Rolf
8 Aug 2012 — 12:51pm

@Frank: Are you sure sfntly handles CFF? When I was playing with it last time (back in March) Brian (from the project) wrote: "[...] Currently sfntly can recognize the CFF table block but cannot take the CFF table apart or reassemble it; ie: cannot edit or subset it. We also want to subset OTF/CFF fonts so we are working on adding subsetting support for CFF but it's a biggish task and will take a while (several seasons)." I think it can read the font, but that's it really.. no real support yet.

Frode Bo Helland
8 Aug 2012 — 12:55pm

I don’t know about subsetting, but I think converting to WOFF and EOT.

Rolf
8 Aug 2012 — 12:55pm

@Michel: yes, I guess I was busy with something else in my head and forget about to either move it to a did in PATH or call it with the full path like ~/ohyes/sfnt2woff
I'm going to try this one, thanks for the tips.

Rolf
8 Aug 2012 — 1:06pm

@Ralf H: thanks for the tips, I will check fontsquirrel again. The thing is that by using it I'm not sure what's going on behind the scenes. I don't know that either when I'm calling sfntly (well, I can check the source code), but at the moment I want to try it locally first anyway to see if I can generate the same results.

As for conversion CFF to TTF, it's indeed not my main concern at the moment. But I rather not convert it right away (automatically) to start with the basics first and then compare later. Like, I don't know if anyone seriously compared the fonts after applying Font Squirrel TT hinting automatically (and by self made conversion or whatever)

How to build woff/web fonts from otf?

User login

Support our Sponsors