Typekit, iPad and Web Fonts

Now that we know all the fonts included in the iPad, it’s time to analyze the web fonts situation. The Typekit guys have published a post about their test with Typekit library and Mobile Safari.

The results are interesting:

“It turns out that iPad ships with a version of Mobile Safari that is almost identical to what ships with the iPhone. And while it supports CSS @font-face, it won’t work with OpenType or WOFF fonts. Instead, using @font-face on the iPad requires fonts to be converted to the SVG format.

Rendering multiple weights from a font family can cause Mobile Safari to crash, even when the individual font file sizes are small (<5k). In our testing, using two weights from a family caused Mobile Safari to crash on up to 50% of attempted page loads, and the crash rate seemed to increase as we increased the number of weights we added. “

Read the full post for all the other technical details, but I think all these errors will be fixed with an OS update.