Dynamic fonts are one of the latest developments in HTML design. Instead of relying on the fonts that are installed on the user's machine, web authors can now create pages using the fonts they have on their systems with the assurance that those pages will display in a browser with their font formatting intact. For Indian language websites this means the users need not download and install the various TrueType fonts that the websites use.
Free tools are available in the Internet using which you can create Dynamic fonts. Basically, these tools create .PFR(Portable Font Resource) files or .EOT(Embedded Open Type) files from the TrueType(TTF) files. The PFR and the EOT files are the competing technologies from the TrueDoc and MicrosoftCorporation respectively. Naturally, the .PFR is supported well in Netscape 4.0 & above Browsers. The .EOT files are supported in Internet Explorer 4.0 & above only.
Usually the HTML page will embed both .PFR & .EOT files. Depending on the type of the browser accessing the HTML page either .PFR or .EOT file will be used to render the page using the Dynamic Fonts.
Dynamic fonts can be used for seamless viewing of the contents (web pages) when the corresponding font in which the content has been created is not present on clients machine. The Dynamic fonts are placed on the server on which the web pages are hosted. They travel to the client machine in a manner transparent to the user. They remain in the cache of the users machine till the time he is viewing a particular webpage and are rendered back the browser once the user exits out of the website.
Dynamic fonts are of 2 types : EOT's and PFR's
EOT - Embedded Open Type format is Microsoft technology of sending encoded fonts to the user. Embedded Open Type (EOT) are dynamic fonts generated from Microsoft's WEFT technology. The dynamic font generated will have the extension as .eot .If you have a link to an EOT on your page then the browser uses these EOT's to display the page with specified fonts (only IE 4.0 and above support EOT's). EOT's have specific URL roots so that only specified Web sites can use specific EOT's made for them. Once an EOT is prepared it is locked to that URL. So the same EOT cannot be used again for some other site.
PFR - Portable Font Resource is another way of sending fonts dynamically to the user. These are prepared using Bitstream's Web font Technology. Any True Type Font can be converted to Dynamic Font. The dynamic font generated will have the extension as .pfr. It can be used both in Netscape (4.03 and above) and IE (4.0 and above). In IE however, there is a one-time download of a control on the client's machine. (Please note that Dynamic fonts are not supported from Netscape 6.0 onwards).
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