CID to WOFF Converter

Bring CID-keyed CJK fonts to the web in compressed WOFF format

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Web-Ready Output

WOFF is natively supported by every modern browser. Converting your CID font to WOFF makes CJK web typography straightforward and efficient.

Rapid Conversion

Our servers handle the CID to WOFF compression quickly, even for fonts with thousands of CJK glyphs. Get your web font in moments.

Private and Secure

Your font intellectual property stays protected — uploaded files are purged immediately and converted WOFF outputs are deleted within 24 hours.

How to convert CID to WOFF

1

Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.

2

Choose woff or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)

3

Let the file convert and you can download your woff file right afterwards

About formats

CID (Character Identifier) is a font architecture developed by Adobe Systems and specified in June 1993 to address the challenges of fonts containing very large glyph sets, particularly for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts. Traditional PostScript fonts identify glyphs by name, which becomes impractical when a font contains tens of thousands of characters — a typical Japanese font may include over 20,000 glyphs. CID-keyed fonts replace glyph names with numeric identifiers organized by a character collection and ordering (such as Adobe-Japan1 or Adobe-GB1), dramatically reducing overhead for glyph access and subsetting. The architecture defines three PostScript font types: Type 9 (CID-keyed Type 1 outlines), Type 10 (CID-keyed Type 3), and Type 11 (CID-keyed Type 42/TrueType). A primary advantage is efficient handling of massive character sets — the numeric CID approach eliminates the memory and processing cost of maintaining thousands of glyph name strings. CID fonts also support sophisticated CMap resources that map encoding values to CIDs, enabling a single font to serve multiple encoding schemes (Unicode, Shift-JIS, Big5) without duplicating glyph data. The architecture integrates well with PDF subsetting, allowing documents to embed only the glyphs actually used. CID-keyed technology laid the foundation for CJK support in both OpenType and modern PDF workflows, and remains active in print production and document processing systems worldwide.
Developer: Adobe Systems
Initial release: June 11, 1993
WOFF (Web Open Font Format) is a web font container format developed by Jonathan Kew, Tal Leming, and Erik van Blokland, and standardized by the W3C as a Recommendation in December 2012. The format wraps existing TrueType or OpenType font data in a compressed container with additional metadata, specifically designed for efficient delivery over HTTP as part of web pages using the CSS @font-face rule. WOFF applies table-level zlib compression to the font data, typically achieving 40-50% size reduction compared to raw TTF or OTF files, while preserving every table and glyph exactly. An extended metadata block allows foundries to embed licensing information, credits, and descriptions that travel with the font file. WOFF was created to address a practical impasse: type foundries were reluctant to allow their fonts on the web in raw TTF/OTF form (easily installable as desktop fonts), while the web standards community needed a freely implementable font delivery mechanism. One advantage is universal browser support — every modern browser across desktop and mobile platforms renders WOFF natively, making it the baseline format for web typography. The distinct file signature and container structure also provides a licensing benefit, giving foundries a format distinguishable from desktop fonts while remaining technically straightforward. WOFF 2.0, standardized in March 2018, replaces zlib with Brotli compression for an additional 20-30% size reduction and has achieved similarly broad browser adoption. Together, WOFF and WOFF2 enabled the custom web typography revolution that transformed web design from a handful of system fonts to millions of typeface options.
Developer: W3C
Initial release: December 13, 2012

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert CID to WOFF?

WOFF is the standard web font format with built-in compression. It lets you serve CID-keyed CJK typefaces on websites with fast load times.

How do I use a WOFF file?

Reference it in your CSS via @font-face. All modern browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge — render WOFF natively without plugins.

Is WOFF smaller than the original CID?

Typically yes. WOFF applies table-level compression that reduces file size significantly, which is especially beneficial for large CJK glyph sets.

Will all CJK characters be included?

The full glyph repertoire from your CID font transfers to WOFF. You can also subset later if you need only specific character ranges.

Does this cost anything?

No — Convertio offers free CID to WOFF conversion. Process your fonts in the browser without installing software or creating an account.

CID to WOFF Quality Rating

3.8 (2 votes)
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