Meta Roman weighs in at 42 KB. This is a fairly typical file size for a single weight of a good font. Now, let’s have a look at Verdana. Verdana is 186 KB. For one weight. The four weight family for Verdana weighs in at 686 KB. Four weights for half a megabyte!? Why so huge?
Well, Verdana has a lot of information packed into its 186 KB. It has the largest hinting data table of any typeface (the information carried by a font that tells it how to align itself to the pixels on your screen). As it has been shipped with Microsoft products since 1996, it has had time to grow to support many, many languages. Along with its cousin, Georgia (283 KB), Verdana was a new breed of typeface. And it’s grown fat.
If really serious web typography takes off – and by that I mean typefaces specifically designed for the screen – then we’re going to see more fonts increase in file size as the font files include more data. So, if you’re embedding a font weighing in at 100 KB, what happens?
I have a geek crush on Mark Boulton.
