Webfonts that can not be opened?

Is there a way to create woff’s that can not (simply) be reversed to TTF’s? I’ve seen this on a number of webfonts recently, they simply turn up as broken fonts if trying to opening them up with TransType or something else. Is there a way to do this with Glyphs?

Yes. There is a custom parameter called Webfont Only. Two words of caution:

  1. Do test the fonts extensively on Windows browsers; especially EOTs (for old versions of IE) tend to break easily. Consider not ‘protecting’ your EOTs if you don’t get them to work.
  2. There is no 100% safety. Even broken fonts can be reverse-engineered. It is just made a little more difficult for a potential perpetrator.

Thanks Rainer, I know of that one and use it quite often. But I’ve seen something else on other webfonts, which is some other “trick”.

Woff’s with ”Webfont Only” seem to destroy the name table only (?), while this other thing I’ve spotted is something else, maybe some ”hack” so the fonts are not even possible to open.

Well, it’s not too important was just curios about it.

Conversely, I recently ran into a situation where opening a woff might have been quite useful. Somehow I’d reverted my Glyphs file to a previous version, and all I had of the correct version were some woffs I’d exported for testing. Unfortunately, being unable to open these in Glyphs meant I had to redo the changes manually. Is the idea of woffs never to be openable? I thought Robofont could do it.

There are tools that can ‘unpack’ woffs to plain OTF. Those can be opened in Glyphs. But I don’t add this on purpose. You will fine very few woffs where the license would allow them to be opened.