Font in your face | Hacker News Reader

Font in your face

nimbupani.com

13 pointsdeepakjois12 comments

good overview/background around the @font-face debates

I'm not holding my breath. Looking at the pace of progress in the browser world I would say it's a safe bet that at least another 5 years will pass before @font-face becomes a serious option for public sites...

I'd say six months at most. It does mean browser detection - serve TTF to Firefox/Webkit/Opera, OTF to IE - but Typekit, Kernest and Typotheque are all either in the market or in beta with combo javascript/CDN services to handle serving the fonts.

Excuse me?

None of the browsers except IE (and safari?) even has a stable version out that supports @font-face. It's indeed possible that within 6 months all browsers will support @font-face in their latest release version, but that's still a far cry from being able to use it in a meaningful way.

If you care enough about typography to consider custom fonts then you're probably not very keen on having most of your visitors fall back to their platform default. And that will be the case for, at the very least, another year, until those browser upgrades have propagated somewhat.

Then there's the whole issue of bugs and browser incompatibilites. Font rendering is not exactly trivial. And again, if you care about your fonts then you're probably not very happy when each browser renders them "slightly differently".

Safari 4, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5 are all stable releases and they all support @font-face.

The only issue is how to support fonts from languages other languages as the font file size will be really big. And this is where the debate on fonts come in.

Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 are beta.

Erm Firefox 3.5 has been released: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

Good overview/background around the @font-face debates.

As a web designer here is my stance:

- I will only use free fonts

- I will only use patent-unencumbered fonts

- I will only use less-than-100k fonts

That's my credo.

I have mentioned in my article where you can get free legal and small size @font-face friendly fonts from. Though it is quite hard to find a small-sized font for languages other than english.

Don't forget that you can setup your webserver to serve font files gzipped, which often gets ~50% compression on ttf's.

yep. But for a 2MB font file that still comes to about 1MB which is quite hefty a load for one page. The main problem is Safari blocks the text from rendering until the font loads, which I think is not good for usability.

Too long; didn't read.

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