I’m very pleased to announce all fonts delivered by Kernest are now compressed.
For Internet Explorer – the fonts have been compressed by Richard Fink’s great new EOTFast tool. EOTFast takes advantage of Microsoft’s Windows GDI Font API to compress the font data within the EOT wrapper. Prior to this advancement – Kernest was delivering uncompressed EOTLite EOT files.
Additionally, if Internet Explorer asks nicely – Kernest will serve up a pre-gzipped EOTFast EOT file. This additional compression can save an additional 40%.
For Firefox 3.6 and up, Kernest has been serving up WOFF files since October. WOFF, like EOT, compresses the font data internally – with gzip, rather than a Windows API call.
This leaves Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) and Opera. For those browsers – Kernest is serving up gzip compressed fonts. Bringing the file sizes of OTFs and TTFs down to the size of the WOFF files.
These compression strategies and Kernest’s client-side caching strategy are part of the larger goal of improving web font delivery performance while keeping the CSS readable and usable.