All the font, without the extra waiting!

You may remember my last blog post where I discussed improvements in speed that we had made to our patented Web Fonts Dynamic Subsetting Solution. Now I have another breakthrough to talk about—Background Loading. Together, our Dynamic Subsetting and Background Loading technologies work together to bring your site the best fonts—and all their characters—with the best performance available. A real game changer in the world of East Asian Web fonts, let’s explore our Background Loading solution in more detail.

As we’ve discussed before, East Asian fonts contain thousands of characters, which can mean big fonts—we’re talking megabytes instead of kilobytes. However, when you have a branding mandate, or want your site to look its best, you really need to use the right font, even if that means an East Asian design. Ideally, performance shouldn’t suffer just because the fonts aren’t based on Latin scripts. The introduction and popularization of Web fonts has provided a way for sites to have beautiful, scalable text, which enhances the Web, whether viewed on a retina screen or mobile device—regardless of language. But as you know, the size of the fonts that produce these great typographic results can compromise speed, if not properly considered.

You can refer to my other post for more details, but our Dynamic Subsetting technology works to address font file size issues head on. Our technology analyzes the characters on the page being rendered and then builds a font on the fly that contains only the characters that are needed. This serves a much smaller font to your user’s browser, helping to easily improve load time.

What’s even faster than that? Serving the font locally from your user’s own machine! So here’s what we’ve done: as our Dynamic Subsetting solution is creating the smallest font possible, we can now open a separate request in the browser to download the full font in the background of their session.

As users surf your site—already having an optimal text experience due to our Dynamic Subsetting technology—the full font is downloaded to the client. Once completed we save a cookie, and the site will begin to request the font directly from the user’s local cache. Whoa! That’s the premium experience and the ultimate in speed.

To prevent issues with already published Web fonts projects, the Background Loading option is currently disabled by default. However, you can easily enable the function within your code when you are using our JavaScript implementation. Here’s an example of the standard JavaScript reference you would call for our service. This includes the Dynamic Subsetting option for East Asian fonts:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://fast.fonts.net/jsapi/bcd66514-6ddc-40be-8c11-d7c7bf806b4f.js”></script>

You simply go in and add this additional script reference above the previously placed JavaScript reference.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//declare array of MTIConfig
var MTIConfig = {};
//MTIConfig to enable/disable Hybrid Configuration.
MTIConfig.UseHybrid= true;
</script>

That’s it! Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments section below. So now we’ve made our East Asian Web fonts solution even better. With the richest collection of fonts available, and the best technology solution in place to serve them, we’ve got you covered.