Finding the specifications for TrueType and OpenType font formats

When working with an application, be it a desktop, mobile or a web application, at some point or another, your client asks you to use a certain font in the user interface for branding purposes. Some free fonts can be simply installed onto a Windows machine, but others require a license and a specific installation procedure for the fonts to work. Yet other fonts cannot easily be embedded into web applications, and require tinkering.

In these situations, it is helpful to learn where to find technical information about TrueType and OpenType fonts. Microsoft has provided a nice specifications page for this purpose. In case you are interested in the internals of fonts and their file formats, check this page out.

Additional tip from the old, Internet Explorer 4 timeframe: the Microsoft Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT). This tool from 1999 is still available, and might be useful when developing ASP.NET web applications with embedded web fonts. This tool creates .EOT files from existing fonts, and generates necessary @font-face CSS code to use them. Check it out!