Typekit, iPad and Web Fonts

Now that we know all the fonts included in the iPad, it’s time to analyze the web fonts situation. The Typekit guys have published a post about their test with Typekit library and Mobile Safari.

The results are interesting:

“It turns out that iPad ships with a version of Mobile Safari that is almost identical to what ships with the iPhone. And while it supports CSS @font-face, it won’t work with OpenType or WOFF fonts. Instead, using @font-face on the iPad requires fonts to be converted to the SVG format.

Rendering multiple weights from a font family can cause Mobile Safari to crash, even when the individual font file sizes are small (<5k). In our testing, using two weights from a family caused Mobile Safari to crash on up to 50% of attempted page loads, and the crash rate seemed to increase as we increased the number of weights we added. “

Read the full post for all the other technical details, but I think all these errors will be fixed with an OS update.

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Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.

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