Overview

font/ttf is the media type for TrueType Font, an older desktop font format created by Apple and Microsoft. It can be used on the web via @font-face, but as an uncompressed original it lags behind WOFF2 in web optimization.

Details

TTF is an uncompressed desktop font format holding glyph outlines. RFC 8081 made font/ttf canonical by introducing the top-level font type, but historically many labels coexisted such as application/x-font-ttf and application/font-sfnt. Browsers can load it as a web font, but since WOFF/WOFF2 store the same glyphs far smaller, prefer WOFF2 on the web.

Unlike the WOFF family, TTF has no built-in compression, making it one of the few font formats where transport-layer gzip/brotli actually reduces size. Still, converting to WOFF2 is fundamentally smaller. When serving cross-origin, it needs CORS headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin) like other web fonts.

Syntax

e.g. Content-Type: font/ttf

File extensions

Notes

• TTF is uncompressed and larger than WOFF2 — convert to WOFF2 for web distribution.
• With no built-in compression, transport gzip/brotli is one of the rare cases where it helps for fonts, but WOFF2 is fundamentally smaller.
• Cross-origin fonts need Access-Control-Allow-Origin (CORS).

Related types

Related headers