A webfont is a digital font specifically packaged and licensed to be used on websites.

They are distributed in lightweight and compressed formats optimized for the web, such as WOFF (Web Open Font Format).

Webfonts can be:
• hosted by third-party providers (e.g., Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts): which serve the font files from their own servers.
• self-hosted: where the font files are stored on the website’s own server and delivered directly to visitors’ browsers.

FONT ENGINEERING HINT

WOFF and WOFF2 are containers that can hold either TrueType or PostScript outlines, but most webfonts are distributed with TrueType outlines since Windows rendering depends on TrueType hinting.