Typekit Practice

“Dynamic subsetting is a promising future direction”

Matt Colyer, writing for Typekit:

Dynamic subsetting, invented by Steve Lee at Monotype, scans a web page to determine the actual characters in use. It then creates—on the fly—a subsetted version of the requested fonts using only those characters, and stores this version in a cache. Dynamic subsetting is a promising future direction, but there are questions about the time it takes to scan the page, return the font, and cache the results. And it’s difficult to tell how well this approach will handle content that is dynamically created.