In which the author introduces himself, and shows how easily @font-face can be used with Plone.

I’ve been along in the outskirts of the Plone community for almost seven years now. So it’s about time I join Planet Plone… In a former life, my first name was Svante. After my computer science studies at Stockholm University, I spent many years working for the Swedish telecom company Ericsson. Since 1997 I’m self-employed. Until 2003 I was living in Stockholm, when I left the cold weather and the exorbitant taxes.

I’m no designer, but nevertheless I try to avoid ugliness no matter what shape it assumes. Hence, I’m very happy to see that “web fonts” slowly are becoming mainstream. The current balkanization (Microsoft with EOT vs. everybody else with WOFF) does however complicate matters for us. An even higher hurdle is the (well founded) fear of the font foundries, that their intellectual property will deflate the same way music and movies have done.

The solution seems to be FaaS (Fonts as a Service), and everybody is currently hyping typekit. Their font offering is huge and of excellent quality. However, I found their licensing terms somewhat draconic, and their technology too javascripty.

A less pricy solution would be KERNEST, but the quality of the fonts I tested didn’t impress me too much.

Finally, I decided to use Typotheque. A very limited set of high quality fonts. No JavaScript. Pay once, use the font forever on how many sites you like (traffic exceeding 500 MB/month costs 1 euro/GB). All I had to do in Plone, was to add a new stylesheet in the Stylesheets Registry (portal_css in ZMI) using the URL generated by Typotheque:

Web Font Project settings on typotheque.com:

portal_css in ZMI:

Finally: If the letters on this page look jagged, and you’re using Windows XP: please enable ClearType!