Font Formats: Who's Alive, Who's Dying, Who's Dead

The Living

WOFF2 Thriving

WOFF2 is the undisputed standard for web fonts in 2026. It uses Brotli compression, which squeezes font files 20–30% smaller than the original WOFF format. Browser support is effectively universal — every browser that still receives security updates supports WOFF2. If you're starting a new web project and need to pick one font format, this is it.

The format supports both TrueType and CFF outlines, preserves all OpenType features, and handles variable fonts. There's no technical reason to use anything else for the web today.

OTF (OpenType with CFF) Healthy

OpenType remains the professional standard for desktop fonts. The CFF (Compact Font Format) variant uses cubic Bézier curves, which designers generally prefer for their smoother curvature at high resolution. OTF files support the full range of advanced typographic features: ligatures, contextual alternates, stylistic sets, small caps, and more.

Where OTF shows its age is on the web — you shouldn't serve raw OTF files to browsers. Wrap them in WOFF2 first. But for desktop use, design work, and as a source format for conversion, OTF is going nowhere.

TTF (TrueType) Healthy

TrueType is older than OTF but far from obsolete. It's the native font format for Windows, widely used in application development, and the basis for most Google Fonts. TTF uses quadratic Bézier curves and a bytecode hinting engine that gives precise control over pixel-grid rendering — which is why system fonts on Windows have traditionally been TrueType.

The format also serves as the underlying structure inside most WOFF and WOFF2 files. When you serve a WOFF2, there's often a TTF inside the wrapper.

Variable Fonts (OTF/TTF with fvar) Growing

Variable fonts pack multiple styles — weights, widths, slants, and custom axes — into a single file. Instead of loading six separate files for Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Light, and Thin, you load one file and interpolate between any value on any axis. The performance benefits are significant for font-heavy designs.

Adoption has accelerated in the past two years. Major foundries now ship variable versions alongside their static families, and Google Fonts has been converting popular families to variable format. The one downside: if you only need Regular and Bold, a variable font may actually be larger than two static files. Use them when you need three or more styles.

The Declining

WOFF (Version 1) Fading

WOFF was a breakthrough when it launched in 2010 — the first format designed specifically for the web. It compressed fonts with zlib and added metadata without altering the outlines. But WOFF2 does everything WOFF does with better compression and has the same browser support in 2026.

The only reason to still serve WOFF is as a fallback for extremely old browsers. If your analytics show zero traffic from pre-2015 browsers (which is the case for most sites), you can safely drop WOFF and serve WOFF2 only.

DFONT Niche

DFONT is a macOS-specific format that wraps TrueType data in a resource fork structure. It was the standard format for macOS system fonts for years, but Apple has been moving toward OTF and TTC (TrueType Collection) for newer system fonts. You'll encounter DFONT files if you're working with older Mac fonts, but there's no reason to create new ones.

The Dead

EOT (Embedded OpenType) Dead

EOT was Microsoft's proprietary web font format, required by Internet Explorer 6–8. It supported DRM and URL binding, which foundries liked but developers hated. With IE's death and Edge's switch to Chromium, there's no browser left that needs EOT. If you're still serving EOT files, delete them from your server and save the bandwidth.

SVG Fonts Dead

SVG fonts defined glyphs as SVG path elements inside an SVG document. They had no hinting, no compression, produced enormous files, and were only ever supported by old versions of Safari on iOS. Chrome dropped support in 2014. There is zero reason to use SVG fonts in 2026. Don't confuse them with SVG-in-OpenType (a color font technology), which is a different thing entirely and is still alive.

PFB / PFA (PostScript Type 1) Dead

Adobe's original digital font format from 1984. PostScript Type 1 fonts were officially deprecated by Adobe in January 2023, meaning they're no longer rendered in Photoshop, Illustrator, or other Adobe apps. If you have legacy Type 1 fonts, convert them to OTF. There's no coming back for this format.