Typekit has outlined changes to the way mobile Safari handles web fonts following the release of iOS 4.2.
Previously iOS would only display SVG fonts and then could only support one weight or style — Safari would crash if more than one was used.
The 4.2 release adds support for TrueType fonts and removes the style limitations.
The advantages are simple: TrueType font file sizes are considerably smaller than SVG — an obvious advantage on mobile devices — and the rendering quality is much higher.
Typekit sees the change as so significant that it is dropping support for pre-4.2 iterations of iOS. This means that anyone designing or maintaining sites using web fonts needs to ensure they allow for the use of fallback fonts.
‘Doing so will also ensure a good experience for users who visit from older browsers, as well as for those who have disabled web fonts,’ says Mandy Brown on the Typekit blog.
Typekit is an Adobe-backed resource which allows website designers to use thousands of fonts, rather than the handful supported natively in web browsers.
