KeyFont

Browsers do a decent job with most stuff, but Type 1 fonts are still a headache. That became a real issue when I was developing my PDF editor.

For the past year, I’ve been working on KeyPDF, a browser-based PDF editor. At some point, I had to face the fact: browsers just don’t support Type 1 fonts properly.

If you haven’t dealt with them, Type 1 fonts are an old Adobe format—you still find them in a lot of PDFs. They show up as .pfa or .pfb files, sometimes as CFF data. The catch? Browsers don’t really know what to do with them. They won’t render or parse them in a way that makes for solid viewing or editing.

That was a big challenge for me.

KeyPDF had to handle these fonts, no skipping or relying on weak fallbacks. So I ended up writing JavaScript modules to tackle them head-on.

I thought it would be a quick fix, but it turned into months of work.

Eventually, I got Type 1 font support working in the browser. But here’s what caught me by surprise: the font system I built wasn’t just useful within KeyPDF—it was strong enough to work as its own tool.

That’s how KeyFont came about.

👉 Try it out: https://keyfont.keypdf.net (it runs in your browser, nothing gets uploaded)

You can think of it as a lightweight FontForge-style tool, but in the browser.

KeyFont started off as a solution for my PDF headaches, but it kept growing. Now, it’s a client-side font utility that handles Type 1 formats along with the usual suspects—TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2.

One thing I figured out from all this: some of the best ideas aren’t really “ideas” at first. They’re just annoyances you can’t ignore.

KeyFont began as a part of KeyPDF, but now I see it as a standalone tool.

I’d love to know if anyone else has run into this: Have you ever built a small tool for your project, then realized it was strong enough to stand on its own?