Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts directory
hellohappy.org
hellohappy.org
FF on the left, Chrome on the right: http://i.imgur.com/SxlaT.png
http://eligrey.com/blog/post/better-font-smoothing-in-google...
This has been an open issue since 2009. I'm surprised it still hasn't been fixed even though it's a daily nuisance in the world of beautiful web fonts and large type sizes:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105944
EDIT: an official DirectWrite port of Chrome/Win is currently under development:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev/...
1) the google web fonts directory is very nice, but does anyone really consider those fonts for readable body text? They are great for headlines and short snippets but a complete article - no thank you. There is a great difference between fancyness and usability.
2) One Exemple is this myth, that OSX' font rendering is always better thant the rendering of windows' rendering because OSX applies more anti-aliasing to the fonts. As soon as you get to a certain font size - usually the one you use for articles - anti-aliased fonts are a pain-in-the-eyes.
3) They might appear worn out but those boring old fonts, like Verdana, that took months to built and cost real money are still the most reliable when it comes to body text. They are boring because there are few alternatives.
4) Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).
It's not quite that simple, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with that assertion. It's more to do with the fact that the font rendering is done differently (regarding whether the "pixel grid" is respected) rather than more anti-aliasing is applied.
> Microsoft payed above average for their fonts. Maybe more than the customers appreciate. But everytime I sit in front of an iPad, MacBook and the like, those dirty fonts destroy the whole product for me. The only way apple is gonna get rid of that cheap rendering performance is by investing in their rendering engine (not gonna happen) or by introducing retina displays in all of their products (more likely to happen).
Apple paid for their professional fonts too, even including Zapfino — simply to show off their font rendering. It's not cheaper, and they already invest a lot in to their rendering engine, which has improved in leaps and bounds over different versions of Mac OS X. Fonts that looks good on Mac OS X can come out terrible on Windows because manual hinting to every typeface has to be applied to make them look good, or Cleartype will come along and distort all the character forms.
The only reason you think Apple's font rendering is cheap is because you're not used to it — and it pervades everything you read. In contrast, to me Windows fonts look "cheaper", in that they're all thin and sickly. However, it should be understood that's it's a subjective choice, rather than one necessarily being better than another.
http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi... and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... might be interesting reading.
This could have been a great article if they hadn't just gone for the easy eye candy but instead actually discuss the fonts in question?
- name of the font
- style of the font (sans, slab-serif, etc)
- who made the font, what style is it based on, what was the designer's purpose/goal with this font
- what does the author of the article think the font is good for
- how complete is the font, what characters does it support, quite a few of them don't even have most of the basic symbols from lower ASCII, that's pretty important to be aware of or you get unpleasant surprises long after the design is done
- how well is the font kerned? this is probably the worst omission, because the OP is actively misleading on this front, look at the source code and notice the special "kern" classes--and just stop right there and close the tab.
Manual kerning, really? Having to do that before a font looks good pretty much excludes it from any serious consideration for usage as a web font. Utterly worthless!
Imagine explaining to a client you designed a website for, that if they need to add new content to the CMS, they must manually kern the headlines! ... errr ... manually do the whut now?
- name of the font
who cares. click through to find out
- style of the font (sans, slab-serif, etc)
you need someone to tell you that? I don't understand.
- who made the font, what style is it based on, what was the designer's purpose/goal with this font
who cares. click through to find out
- how complete is the font, what characters does it support, quite a few of them don't even have most of the basic symbols from lower ASCII, that's pretty important to be aware of or you get unpleasant surprises long after the design is done
Yes, that information is clearly visible when you click through.
Imagine explaining to a client you designed a website for, that if they need to add new content to the CMS, they must manually kern the headlines! ... errr ... manually do the whut now?
Yes, you'd look like an idiot if you did that.
I do wish there were more fonts with 3+ styles (reg, bold and ital at least), though I'm sure that'll change with time.
On a related note, this was linked from a few places the other day:
For example, Open Sans and Arimo are two good Sans fonts created by the awesome Steve Matteson. I am currently using Arimo for my new project, and it s a nice replacement for the vanilla Arial/Helvetica [Neue].
By contrast, Open Sans is lovely, go nuts with it. :)
I need a good alternative to Arial. Do you have any other recommendations from google web fonts?
I’d give up dozens of attractive but incomplete fonts for a single complete one. One or two bugs or minor missing features puts a font out of the question as a default.
Sorts mill Goudy has italics, text figures etc http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/sorts-mill-goudy
Clearly though there is much to do in free fonts.
http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/
As a nice twist I tested and found that if you place your googlefontdirectory in $HOME/.fonts then the gnome-tweak-tool will scan and pick up the fonts, even in Unity!
22 HTTP requests
442.61KB transferred
Thankfully we're not facing an increasing use of mobile devices on high latency networks. Oh.
Platform and browser defaults have come so far that nowadays my preferred font stack is this:
font-family: sans-serif;Why is that? I thought the system fonts would be TrueType or OpenType, and so use the same renderer as web fonts. Not that I know much about the technical details of fonts; is it possible to optimize a font for ease of rendering?
(Or maybe I could, I know, I know ...)