Eben Sorkin
Browser versions Different editions or versions of the same a brand of browsers e.g. Chrome 10 versus Chrome 11, can mean changes to the way a font renders to screen. Thus deciding how many browser versions to include in your testing is important too. Statistics indicating popularity and trends in popularity too can also help guide decisions about which browser versions to focus on in testing and which ones to disregard. So far, looking only at computers and looking only at the most popular browsers, we have identified at least 40 different individual environments that you may want to test your webfont in. This means over 160 tests to make if your type family has the classic four styles of regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. Font Formats There are also a variety of font formats. They are worth mentioning as a variable for testing because format can make text look different too. Most browsers accept more than one webfont format. No browser accepts all of them. Webfont formats include Web Open Font Format or WOFF, OpenType True Type or TTF, OpenType Postscript or OTF and Scalable Vector Format or SVG format. It is important to become familiar with statistics about font formats along with those of web browsers and web browser versions. The importance of hinting One of these formats, OpenType True Type or TTF is the format which is capable of containing hinting. This hinting is very relevant for Windows and to some extent GNU Linux. If TTF web fonts are part of the webfont plan testing the hinting in the TTF format will be a very important part of the overall testing plan. Hinting is usually done to address specific rendering styles in Windows. The process of hinting for each kind of rendering in Windows is fairly similar but as the technologies become newer, the number of hinting commands required to be embedded in the TTF to get good results becomes less. Choosing the kind of rendering the hinting will be optimized for is an important design choice and will also be relevant to a plan for testing. If the design being worked on will be published by a foundry, it may not be necessary to hint the font. Auto hinting in Fontlab or via a script or service may be enough. Alternatively a professional hinter be hired. It is worth noting that in general, the more you have tuned your font’s 22