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Monotype Releases Web Font Platform, Giving Developers Access to More Fonts with Less Effort
[May 19, 2015]

Monotype Releases Web Font Platform, Giving Developers Access to More Fonts with Less Effort


TMCnet Contributing Writer
 

Monotype announced recently that its Web font platform had become available. Web developers building HTML5 content will be able to use almost 100,000 fonts without as much effort as earlier versions of the markup language required.

Woburn, Massachusetts-based Monotype Imaging (News - Alert), Inc. (MII) traces its origins to the mechanical typesetting of the 19th century. In the 1960s, a company named Compugraphic sought to computerize typography and cross-licensed some typefaces with Monotype Typography. Several corporate acquisitions led to today's MII and its scalable fonts.



Fonts are one of those things that are often taken for granted, but when pages don't display correctly, it can leave Web designers scrambling to fix the problem. The reason that they are taken for granted is that once someone gets a website to appear correctly, the tendency is to treat the work as done and move on.

If a developer builds a site from a Windows-based computer, and uses the small selection of fonts the company offers, the browser will render it correctly on any computer that has that font installed. But what if someone has a different version of Windows with a different set of fonts? What if the system is Apple (News - Alert) or Linux? These problems occur without taking into consideration the different browsers out on the market.


When the browser cannot find a matching font, it does the best that it can to make things work by using a common font like Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier in place of the desired font. This is not a great option, because the look of the page tends to become so 1996-like. These tired and boring fonts are readable, but they do not have the visual appeal that newer web fonts have.

So using a webfont properly meant installing the webfont kit to the desired website and including the webfont stylesheet, but even that process can be cumbersome. With Monotype's integration kit, web developers can use a UI to manage fonts. It's a much easier process.

Thanks to Monotype's new Web font platform, it is much easier to integrate newer fonts into a webpage. These fonts will allow for more visually appealing branding. They will be able to work cross platform without regard to the underlying OS or browser. It will also free up Web developers to work on more critical, under-the-hood problems. 




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino

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