Ohhh, I was so hopeful to

In reply to @font-face Style Linking – Does it Really Work in IE7-8??:

Ohhh, I was so hopeful to have found the answer with internal style linking! UNFORTUNATELY, unless I converted something improperly, after 'fixing' the internal font name issues there is absolutely NO difference in behavior! Ugh...

Here's the process I used:

1. I first used the free 'Microsoft Font Properties' tool to inspect the TTF versions of the fonts. Sure enough, they all said 'Regular' for the SubFamily name, and the Font Family name was actually blank on most.
2. I then used a tool called 'FontForge' to open the TTF fonts and edit the Family names to be all the same (AvantGardeGothic). Then I changed the TTF SubFamily names to what they should be according to the weight/style (Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic).
3. I generated new fonts after making these simple changes.
4. When viewing the properties on these new TTF files, they did now all have the same Font Family name and proper SubFamily names.
5. I then followed some instructions on using the Microsoft WEFT tool to convert the TTFs to EOTs. (after this didn't appear to work, I also tried an online version of a tool called 'ttf2eot').
6. Lastly I uploaded the new EOT files, cleared history & hard-refreshed IE7, and NOTHING different! I tried stripping down the CSS @font-face declarations to be just IE-specific (only specifying the EOTs), and still nothing.

- Could I have done something wrong still??
- Is there any way to examine the properties of the EOTs to make sure they didn't get messed up in conversion??

And Ralf, I appreciate the insight. I think if I was going to skip style linking for IE, I would just skip it for everything and manually add the specific font-family info to every instance necessary (skipping adding IE-only CSS). The point of this post was to see if style linking IS EVEN possible at all in IE7-8. If you go setup a simple font stack at Typekit, you'll see that you don't have to do what you're talking about with adding specific font-families to every CSS rule. You just add the one font-family name, and do everything else as-if it was a local font.

Still wondering what magic FontsLive.com and Typekit use...