Question

Here’s a list of stuff I tried in random order:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .otf
AddType
default_mimetype
auto_prepend_file = "otf.php"
zlib.output_compression = On
output_handler = ob_gzhandler
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");

Even though all the PHP files of the server get gzipped using zlib, replacing the .otf extension by .php didn’t work either.

Answer 1

With .htaccess, you could do like this, assuming font file is fontfile.otf.gz, browser request that as fontfile.otf

RewriteEngine On

#Check for browser's Accept-Encoding, remove it for force return gzipped one
RewriteCond "%{HTTP:Accept-Encoding}" "gzip.*deflate|deflate.*gzip"

#check file name is endswith otf
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} "\.(otf)$"

#check existance of .gz file name
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -s

#rewrite it to .otf.gz
RewriteRule ^.*$ %{REQUEST_URI}.gz [L]

#update some response header
<FilesMatch "\.otf\.gz$">
    AddEncoding gzip .gz
    ForceType "text/plain"
</FilesMatch>

And if font file and web site is cross-domain, you need to put Access-Control-Allow-Origin, firefox will not load font objects cross-domain.

In Gecko, web fonts are subject to the
same domain restriction (font files
must be on the same domain as the page
using them), unless HTTP access
controls are used to relax this
restriction.

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin *