What is the status of TTF support in Internet Explorer?

internet-explorer fonts font-face webfonts true-type-fonts
JC Hulce picture JC Hulce · Jul 17, 2013 · Viewed 46.2k times · Source

I'm trying to determine the status of support for the TTF font format on Internet Explorer. (I don't have any Windows machines on hand to try it with.) The table at caniuse states that IE from version 9 onwards supports TTF but "only working when [fonts are] set to be installable". What does that mean? That page links to a blog post on MSDN, which describes updated font support on IE9. It isn't very clear or explicit; I think the "raw fonts" being referred to mean ttf and otf. It says "supported font formats include ... raw fonts with embedding permissions set to installable"

So, in summary:

  • Does IE support ttf fonts at all?
  • If ttf support exists, does it differ among IE9, IE10, and IE11?
  • What does "embedding permissions set to installable" mean in reference to ttf fonts?

Answer

JC Hulce picture JC Hulce · Jul 18, 2013

So as I mentioned in my question above, Internet Explorer has some ttf support starting with version 9, but "only working when [fonts are] set to be installable".

Some background:

...TrueType fonts have embedding "bits" which allow the creator of the font to decide the level of embedding that will be permitted. There are four different embedding bits: (1) no embedding, (2) embedding for view and print only, (3) embedding for view, print and editing, and (4) installable embedding.. Many small type design houses have set their embedding bits so that embedding of any kind is not permitted. ...

Source (also contains a lot of other information on this) and here's Another source with similar info

In another question, dealing with the embedding bits was discussed. It was revealed there that the Font Squirrel webfont generator automatically deals with these embedding bits by default on most fonts. Since I had ran my font through font squirrel I was good to go. I tweaked my CSS to prefer TTF over WOFF for testing and obtained the following results using webpagetest:

Note that I did not test fonts without the embedding bits set to installable, no I cannot say anything about that. But the general conclusion is that TTF fonts work in IE 9 onwards when the embedding bits are set to installable

Related questions

IE9 - CSS3111: @font-face encountered unknown error

I embed three Google Fonts from http://www.google.com/webfonts (Dosis, Open Sans, Lato) And they all work fine except IE9 where it returns: CSS3111: @font-face encountered unknown error. 2HG_tEPiQ4Z6795cGfdivPY6323mHUZFJMgTvxaG2iE.eot CSS3111: @font-face encountered …

Read More
How to make this Google Font work on Internet Explorer 11

I use Montserrat font on my website, but it doesn't display on IE11 (windows 7). I put this other question some days ago: Montserrat font isn't displayed on IE 10 and 11 Now i am trying to add Montserrat google font throught the …

Read More
Using @import for google fonts is not working on internet explorer

I am trying to use google fonts on my web but I have an issue with internet explorer. I am using @import, and when I google it I see that people use it this way: @import url('http://fonts.googleapis.…

Read More