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Comment by rossriley | Hacker News Reader

Two reasons. 1. IE support whilst possible doesn't give great quality results, especially at smaller point sizes. 2. Font licensing hassle. None of the foundries seem to want to license fonts and getting an online license is often too much hassle. Image replacement is ok, since you're not making the font file and metrics available to download.

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Actually, point #2 is wrong. Most of the major foundries have their own font licensing system these days (or it's a work-in-progress). It's not the greatest solution since you can't have all your licensed fonts in, say, TypeKit, but it's not too bad.

- Linotype/Monotype: http://webfonts.fonts.com/

- Bitstream: http://new.myfonts.com/info/webfonts/

- FontFont: http://www.fontfont.com/opentype/

- TypeKit (various foundries): http://typekit.com

…and Hoefler & Frere-Jones is currently working on a web font licensing system as well.

Yes, that may be true but that's some foundries and some fonts. How these things normally work is that the branding and typography for a brand is done by a separate agency who specify the typefaces, then a separate digital agency have to implement it. If the chosen typeface isn't available with an online license then you have to fall back to replacement.

Maybe in another year or so things will have improved to the state where more typefaces are available for online use than not.

> Most of the major foundries have their own font licensing system these days (or it's a work-in-progress).

Perhaps, but are any of them commercially reasonable yet? Pretty much all of the ones I've seen require either ongoing payments and/or third party hosting, or an up-front fee that scales with the (anticipated?) number of page views. As far as I can see, no-one else providing a related product/service gets these kinds of terms: would you pay a monthly fee for a piece of clip art, or a higher licensing fee based on how many times you wanted to print your annual report on paper?

Wrong is too harsh. Those are all recent developments, sometimes work in progress. Licensing wasn’t easy only a few months ago and it is only now getting gradually easier. It’s – like the grandparent said – a hassle.

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