Mozilla announced today that it is going to include support for WOFF fonts, a font format designed for use on the Web, in Firefox version 3.6. I support this format and plan to allow my distributors to license WOFF fonts to customers.

At this point, Firefox is the only browser to support this format, so it’s not quite ready for prime-time yet. But there is a lot of support for this in the font industry, and hopefully the other major browser makers, Apple and Microsoft, will join in soon.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Anonymous Pro Version 1.001. This version contains mostly user-requested tweaks and fixes, including:

• The comma and the comma part of the semicolon have been moved down about a pixel (depending on the size) to improve clarity.
• The design of the “quotesinglbase” and “quotedblbase” match the look of the “straight” quotes (the earlier designs didn’t match anything).
• The periods and other “dot” punctuation elements are a bit bigger in some bitmap sizes/styles.
• Fixed the hinting problem that caused the tops of the caps to vary in height a certain sizes on Windows (hard to figure out the reason, but easy to fix once I knew).
• Corrected the 13ppem bitmap glyph for the Greek character “omicrontonos” (which, embarrassingly, sported an umlaut).

And last, but not least:

• I dropped my old DIY license and switched to the SIL Open Font License, which should make a lot of users in the open source community happy.

Small note to Windows users: I haven’t updated the sample that shows what Anonymous Pro looks like in text sizes on Windows with ClearType enabled. It looks better than that now. I’ll update it soon.

Mostra (2001) was originally conceived as a caps-only font. The source for its inspiration, lettering on Italian Art Deco posters from the 1930s, rarely included lowercase letters. Nevertheless, not long after I released it, I started thinking about what a lowercase for it might look like.

As OpenType fonts grew in popularity and acceptance, an OpenType version of Mostra, with its many alternate characters, seemed inevitable. Separating the alternates across three fonts for each weight was the only practical solution back in 2001. This worked okay, until you wanted to combine alternates from the separate fonts. It’s simply not possible to provide kerning pairs between characters in different fonts. And I did intend for the fonts to be used in this way, not only as separate fonts.

When it came time to develop an OpenType version of Mostra, combining the three fonts into one was the main idea, and it would have been simple enough to go that route, but then I remembered the idea of adding a lowercase. After making some trial designs, I decided it was worth the extra effort.

Of course, it takes time to add all those new characters, and the mind tends to wander. Before I finished designing the lowercase, I had thought of even more alternate characters for the uppercase. And, of course, many of these required analogs for the lowercase as well. Upshot: Lots of new characters.

And then I decided to add a sixth weight. I’d been looking at some hairline fonts for some reason and I suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be great if Mostra Nuova had a hairline weight? Yes, it would.

Mostra had 26 capital letters plus 15 alternates. Mostra Nuova has 52 upper- and lowercase letters plus 40 alternates. In the original version, the number of possible letter pair combinations was 650. The number of letter pair combinations for Mostra Nova is 8372. This meant that the number of kerning pairs needed would increase by more than ten fold. Times six weights. This didn’t quite sink in until I was well into kerning. Did I mention that I thought I expected to be done last April? But it was worth it in the end.

Of course, Mostra Nuova has much better language support, covering most Latin-based languages in Western and Central Europe. It also has a special feature so that when you change something to all-caps, things like hyphens and bullets are automatically centered on the height of the caps rather than the lowercase.

All in all, Mostra Nuova is a much more versatile font than its predecessor. Available now.

I announced back in April that a new version of my popular free font Anonymous™ would be available soon. That would be today.

Anonymous Pro is now available.

Proxima Nova stars in a new animated short film by Brent Barson, sponsored by Veer: “F is for Fail” (and co-starring Adobe’s Arno Pro). The still from the film (above) sums up my reaction. Well done, Brent! (And thanks to Veer, too.)

I’m really honored to have my Lakeside and Filmotype Zanzibar among the 40 typefaces chosen in Typographica’s “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2008”. Thanks so much, Dyana and J.F.

I participate in this annual tradition from the other side of the fence as well. I chose Nick Shinn’s Modern Suite, which blew me away when I saw the specimen book for it at last year’s TypeCon in Buffalo.