Google’s new Font Directory is a Disaster
arnorhs.com
arnorhs.com
"I don’t have a clue how they expect to make money from this or why they wanted to create the directory in the first place"
I'll tell you why: To encourage the use of plain text instead of images. Every time a webmaster uses Google's font directory instead of resorting to an image file, Google's job gets easier.
Edit: This is probably not useful to them, actually, due to caching. However, it is their prerogative at any time to change their resource behavior and start receiving every request.
Anyone concerned about this will just copy the result to their own server, right?
They look fine for headings and such, but not when used for readable text.
On the mac it works fine.
And the way they aligned themselves with the web, what's-best-for-google tends to regularly be good for us too, although not always.
This is a platform demo - in the same vein as Typekit. If the model and platform works, Google will be able to sell typography direct to developers.
The web is progressing towards native support of @font-face. This is an intermediate step that will get us there - and, imo, it's also a way that Google could potentially experiment with selling font IP as a service. I say this largely because it would possibly dovetail with their efforts to sell IP via their recently announced app-store.
I don't think many websites display their text solely using images (without use of image replacement techniques) - though maybe I'm wrong?
Even non-decent front-end developers have an incentive to use IR; largely because Google's desire to index corresponds with most site owner's desire to be found.
Despite what it may look like according to most vocal people on the web, great majority of people still use Windows.
New Google fonts look noticeably worse than default fonts on all browsers in Windows XP/Vista/7.
Well rendered old fonts are still much nicer than ugly rendered new fonts.
Which means if you will use these new Google fonts, user experience for majority of your visitors is going to be worse than before (unless your visitors are heavily skewed toward OSX or Linux).
The rendering quality of his test cases has nothing to do with the method these fonts were embedded.
Anyway, Windows XP is the biggest source for this kind of problems, as you can see in this chart:
I can't see how you're going to blame this whole issue on Windows, when other fonts in the same operating system get rendered much better in smaller sizes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting
Creating such a Font Hinting is, from my understanding, quite a tedious task and became unnecessary for newer systems. Most fonts that don't come along with Windows, simply don't have this hinting built in anymore.
there must be something wrong in the usage, sine at google code site the font is rendered smoothly.
edit: This seems to only be an issue with the way Windows renders fonts. The fonts look awesome in Ubuntu or Mac systems
This must be a browser issue. I am running Safari 4.0.5(6531.22.7)
smooth and sweet. all seems fine.
it seems like windows issue more than google issue.
Even though it's fine on your computer, it's not fine at all on windows machines
However, it renders decently on the Google site, I don't see it like how you show it on twitpic.
This problem is also only apparent on smaller text sizes. As soon as the font gets bigger, as for headings, the fonts look fine.
text-shadow: #fff 0 0 1px;
Now someone just needs to figure out how to get IE to play nice.