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What is the difference between a Desktop font and a Web font?

A desktop font is designed to be installed on your computer for use with applications such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Desktop fonts often have special OpenType features that give users flexibility in designing with them.

 

A web font is a specially tuned font for use on websites using the CSS @font-face declaration. This allows the text on your site to appear in the font without the font being installed on your users' computers.

 

The Fontspring web fonts have no OpenType features and often have extraneous glyphs removed.  A modern web font comes in two formats: WOFF and WOFF2. These files target 99% of browsers currently browsing the internet and can't be installed for desktop use. The remaining unsupported browsers are older and no longer supported by their developers.

 

If you want to create custom webfont files that include OpenType features or more languages, you can use our Webfont Generator to create them. It can get complicated, so you can just read more about the settings and what they do here. You can learn more about it here if you'd like. 

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