What is the difference between embedded web fonts and regular TrueType desktop fonts?

Question

I have a good free desktop font and it is free also for font embedding on the web. The font uses Arabic Unicode and it is TrueType desktop font.

I want to use this font on my website. The problem that most web font converters or generators like font squirrel and typeface.js render the letters separately, not linked together.

I used this Unicode ranges to create the web fonts:

FE70-FEFF,0600-06FF,FB50-FDFF,0750-077F,0621-0652

This should convert all Arabic Unicode characters and should make the letters linked together or attached together like what happen on desktop font but that does not happen.

Can I just use the desktop font file itself without converting it? What is the difference between a regular desktop font and web embedded font? BTW, the font desktop file is only 27kb and I tested it in Firefox. It is working great if installed on the system (of course it is on my computer).

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the ttf file itself. Most browsers, except Internet Explorer 8 and lower, support this format. To support IE8 as well, you must transform the font into an eot file and upload that too. Can't really recommend any specific font converter, having no experience with Arabic fonts, but I'm sure there must be others except fontsquirrel. Have you tried FontForge?

Anyway, in my experience, font files downloaded and installed into the user's system work far better than web fonts, because font support from within the browsers is far from optimal. Some fonts work, others don't with no indication why, yet others don't display well (with the wrong spacing, or as if there is no hinting, etc).
So if you do use a web font, make sure you a) test thoroughly in many different browsers, and b) provide good fallback fonts in the css, in case your webfont doesn't work.