TrueDoc Technology (“Dynamic Fonts”)

TrueDoc technology was developed by Bitstream in 1994. Netscape partnered with Bitstream in 1996 to include “Dynamic Font” support in the Navigator 4.0 browser. In 1998, Dynamic Fonts became available for Internet Explorer 4.0 via an ActiveX control. TrueDoc is capable of compressing TrueType and Type 1 fonts, and it is compatible with the Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms.

File Format

Portable Font Resource (.pfr )

Technology

TrueDoc uses a method called “direct rendering” which means the font information is rendered (by a very compact rasterizer program) within the browser itself without relying on the operating system.

The information for several fonts can be compressed into a single .pfr file.

Font Embedding Tool

Eventually, TrueDoc font embedding tools will be built into popular WYSIWYG web-authoring applications. However, as of this writing, the only available tool is HexWeb Typograph 2.0, from HexMac, which works on both Windows and Macintosh. It is available as a standalone product, or as a plug-in to BBEdit for the Mac or FrontPage for the PC.

You can download a free demo of HexWeb at http://www.hexmac.com/.

HTML Code

Navigator and Internet Explorer require slightly different methods for attaching Dynamic Fonts to an HTML document.

Netscape Navigator 4.0:

.pfr files are embedded using a <LINK> tag, as follows:

<LINK rel="fontdef" src="url/fontname.pfr">

The <link> tag goes between the <head> and </head> tags at the top of the document.

Internet ...

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