The State of Progressive Font Enrichment | Garret Rieger, Rod Sheeter | ATypI 2019 Tokyo

Progressive font enrichment, a brand-new technology for efficiently transferring fonts on the web, is currently being standardized by the W3C Web Fonts Working Group. This technology has the potential to significantly speed up font transfers, especially when dealing with fonts containing large numbers of glyphs (e.g., Noto CJK). Today, delivering fonts to the web is difficult. You have to either cut them up (by using unicode-range subsetting, which compromises fidelity) or accept long (especially for CJK) load times. This nascent standard aims to offer the best of both worlds: let the browser tell the server what parts of the font it needs and download only those. Upon visiting another site using the font, download a binary patch to add any missing parts. Garret Rieger’s presentation covers how progressive font enrichment will work and how it can benefit you. He’ll also discuss the current progress of standardization in the W3C Web Fonts Working Group.None