to create solutions
UBA's font team researches font technologies and develops font tools. We're doing
continuous research and study on today's industry standard font formats for
desktop like OpenType (Postscript and TrueType flavor) and TrueType. In
addition, we have experience in converting thousands of fonts, using font
conversion tools, into standard web font formats like Embedded OpenType (eot),
MicroType Extress (mtx), Web Open Font Format (WOFF and WOFF 2), Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG).
We have done extensive research and development in font subsetting technology.
In simplest form, font subsetting is the technology where a bigger font with
large number of glyphs is reduced to a font with only necessary glyphs, reducing
the font size.
UBA has been working in research related to providing most relavent font pair. This is currently limited to serif and sans-serif pairs.
Dynamic subsetting is patented technology of Monotype. It collects text and subset font on the fly. Without serving full font, it will subset font such that the font file will contain glyph information of requested characters. Typical Chinese fonts include over 13,000 characters at 8MB. With dynamic subsetting that same file is reduced to less than 200KB. It will reduce wait times, improve user experience and saves unnecessary bandwidth. Dynamic subsetting can be used for dynamically branded content, multi-language content, mobile and tablet content and rich media.
We're continually doing research/study on font compression technologies that are used in webfonts, like MicroType Extress (mtx), Web Open Font Format 2 (WOFF 2) etc, which are vital for delivering webfonts more faster and securely. We work hard and compare different font compression technologies used in webfonts to ensure that user get best webfonts in each platforms.
If you have ever worked with web fonts then this is not a new topic for you. Ever since the introduction of web fonts in the modern browsers across multiple platforms, user has now access to huge number of fonts that were limited to few limited users only. But transforming from desktop font to web font could be sometimes tricky as each browsers has is own font validators. Font that is working in one browser might not render in another browser at all. Like a web font rendering perfectly in Chrome in Windows might not render in mobile Safari in iPhone.
This is RnD related to parsing weburl and analyzing the resources thats available within the web page. It involves filering out the text and getting the font-family that been used on such fonts.
This involves using custom code and third party libraries to parse files and detect fonts thats been used in the file but not currently available in users system.
Our Involvement
