Google Font Directory (expanded, moved to new URL) | Hacker News Reader

Google Font Directory (expanded, moved to new URL)

google.com

133 pointsmoeffju30 comments

My favorite feature of this: the option to donate to the font designer when you download. +1 (although I'd love to see the conversion stats).

They should call it "reward," not "donate." These guys produced something valuable, we aren't giving them cash for nothing. I wish they lose the "donate" word in all situations like this (free software, etc.).

I think they should use whatever verb results in the highest conversion rates. Who cares about semantics -- it's more important that the designers are getting paid.

Edit: typo.

These look a lot better than when Google first came out with the font API. The selection is pretty good now, and seems like a great free alternative to Typekit.

FYI with Typekit you'll need to use 'mo bulletproof' instead of the default supplied demo CSS, otherwise your fonts won't show on Android (due to an Android bug).

Replying to self: downmod that!

Typekit got in contact: they don't use the Paul Irish 'bulletproof' syntax that has the bug (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3200069/css-fonts-on-andr...). They serve separate stylesheets to separate browsers - sorry, I have my font services confused!

Not that you said otherwise, but Typekit has a ton of free fonts, which are free to use through their service.

But they limit you on page views and also require you put a Typekit badge on your site

Their fonts are definitely worth paying for, though. If you're into that sort of thing...

I don't want to rain on the parade, but I can't believe there is no search box! :) On the other hand, great selection of fonts, and betting on Google not being down is probably safer than betting any other font service not being down.

Still (IMHO) not quite correctly anti-aliasing under IE/Windows

Is that specific to webfonts implemented this way or the known difference between Windows and other systems? (The Windows font render tweaks its processing to force greater alignment with the pixel grid, to improve the sharpness of the output, where other font renderers are more accurate in their stroke positioning but this can lead to things looking more "fuzzy" (and, depending on your monitor's settings, darker)

> available for use on your website under an open source license

what does this mean? am i free to use it on my website or can i edit/fork them?

It's really weird (and a bit alarming) that they don't link to the license on this page. Open source is pretty damn vague.

Click a font.

http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Astloch&sub...

Complete with a link to: SIL Open Font License, 1.1

I would imagine they don't link to it on the index because they're reserving the capability for fonts to have different licenses.

For now I am still not keen on webfonts, as my primary language is Chinese, which, even using simplified form, would need at least 1000 popular characters. Unless there is a even more dynamic way to load fonts by splitting font characters by usage frequency, it would be a no-go for that (who uses webfonts in the size of megabytes?)

You can remove unused ligatures from embedded fonts: this is actually quite commonly done to stop downloaders getting the full charset.

However Chinese fonts are not dependent on ligatures, so that won't be practical to do so.

There are tools which allow you to subset fonts, splitting them up by character, so you could, say, produce a font containing only those characters that you have in your headlines for you headline font. For example, Font Squirrel http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator will allow you to chose particular characters to include in your subset; though that's not very useful unless you really only need a handful of characters that you can enter manually.

It's true that for practical reasons, web fonts are less useful for CJK characters than they are for languages with smaller character sets. I imagine someone will write tools to make it a little easier to deal with, but it may not ever be as convenient as for other writing systems.

Well I am aware that this is possible, but only useful if I can somehow "combine" subsets into one single font. I have not yet devoted time to see if this is actually possible right now, though.

Say I have the lists of usage frequency for my target language (say Simplified Chinese) and then I want the most used 60% in subset A and other 40% on subset B. But at the end I need to have 100% applied to the same font, which doesn't seem possible without some javascript mangling by looking up the text to apply the correct subset ...

I already had this bookmarked in my Delicious account. The only change to the URL seems to be that it is http instead of https.

The project used to live on Google Code. Moving it to google.com directly shows, to me, that Google put more importance on it now.

Looks like they changed the name. http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-web-fonts-... says "To make it easier for all, we’re also pleased to announce a re-branding of the “Google Font Directory” to “Google Web Fonts.” The service is now available via the simple, memorable URL: www.google.com/webfonts ."

This page just freezes my Firefox.

Really? Loads fine in 3.6.13 and 4.0b11 for me (OS X).

3.6.13 here as well on Fedora. Works fine in Opera.

Crashes Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu.

http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/issues/detail?i...

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=598166 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626966 are linked from there, but they seem to indicate it's done. Perhaps Firefox hasn't pulled in the fix for 3.x yet.

It seemed to work for me. Either they pulled another "bad" font, or a recent Ubuntu update (according to the Google bug it's a pango update) fixed the root cause.

Doesn't work in FF 3.6?

Looking at the actual Google page, the fonts don't load.

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