Font "Fre3of9x" does not load

Question

So, I'm trying to download the “Barcode” font, which will replace plain text with the barcode on my web page.

Now I am new to using fonts. The font I'm trying to use is this:

http://www.fontsupply.com/fonts/F/Fre3of9x.html FRE3OF9X.TTF

Error message: Failed to decode downloaded font:

I see the font loading 304 in the network console. So what causes this problem?

HTML

 <div class="barcode"><span class="barcodeText">*11111*</span></div> 

CSS

 @font-face { font-family: 'FRE3OF9X'; src: url('/fonts/FRE3OF9X.TTF'); } .barcodeText{ font-family: 'FRE3OF9X', 'Georgia', serif;; } 

Result

 *11111* 

I also received this message OTS parsing error: maxp: failed to parse table . But I don’t know what it is for.

Fiddle

https://jsfiddle.net/f2a6gcvu/

EDIT
I did not solve this, but changed the font. 3 out of 9 works great.

https://www.searchfreefonts.com/free/3-of-9-barcode.htm

Answer 1

The reason you get a decoding error is because the font is actually damaged. Running it through TTX (a utility for switching font representations between binary and XML form), we get the following:

 > ttx FRE3OF9X.TTF Dumping "FRE3OF9X.TTF" to "FRE3OF9X.ttx"... Dumping 'GlyphOrder' table... Error: cmap subtable is reported as having zero length: platformID 1, platEncID 0, format 0 offset 20. Skipping table. Dumping 'head' table... Dumping 'hhea' table... Dumping 'maxp' table... Dumping 'OS/2' table... Dumping 'hmtx' table... Error: cmap subtable is reported as having zero length: platformID 1, platEncID 0, format 0 offset 20. Skipping table. Dumping 'cmap' table... Dumping 'loca' table... Dumping 'glyf' table... Dumping 'name' table... Dumping 'post' table... 

Since the cmap structure contains information about which character the font supports, the broken cmap sub-table is the final error. You can try to output broken data from other cmap subtitles (which Photoshop probably does), but this does not guarantee the correctness of the action. Browsers err on the side of caution, so this font will simply be rejected.

What to do: 1. report this font as broken for the website so that it can either fix it or delete it, 2. select a new font (I see you already did it) and 3. probably grab a copy of TTX for yourself checks for bad fonts in the future.