using @font-face for 2 fonts causing big slow-down

Question

This is the first time I've used @font-face. The font pack is from myfonts.com and I'm currently testing in Safari and noticed through the web inspector that the css file, which loads the 2 fonts shows as a nearly-2mb-download ! the fonts appear to be there as base64 encoded. The pack didn't include the actual .otf files.

I've added Gzipping via a .htaccess file and this has cut down the size of that file by nearly half but at 1mb, it's still not acceptable and I can't understand why it's so big.

Answer 1

Base64 is larger than the original file around 1.3 - from wikipedia. You can convert the file back to its original state with this convertor, but there are a lot of tool on the net.