Google Font CDN | Hacker News Reader

Google Font CDN

google.com

13 pointsmiket8 comments

While I LOVE Google fonts, and use it often, I don't see anything new about the service and I think most of HN is already well familiar.

Agreed. Am I missing something here? Its google fonts. Big deal.

One feature I really like is "Pairings" which gives you a list of fonts that looks good with the one you selected so you can easily find headline and body combinations.

To use this feature choose a font and click on the little 'pop out' icon (that looks like one square on top of another) and then click "Pairings". Here's an example: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lobster#pairings

Nitpick: It's not a CDN if it can't distribute _my_ content. "Google Font Service" would be more apt I think.

That doesn't sound right. There are a variety of CDNs out there for things like javascript libraries that aren't available for you to use for your own content.

According to Wikipedia [1], a CDN is simply "a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

That definition sounds overly broad, but i'm having trouble disproving it. I think I figured out how to describe why it sounds weird in this case.

When you use a car, you're usually driving on public roads. But you don't say "hey honey, would you like to use the road to get some chinese food?" because the application you (the user) are using directly is not the road, it's the car. The car just happens to use the road as a means of interconnection from home to the chinese takeout place.

There can be many kinds of distributed systems of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet to serve content to end-users. But often these serve other functions besides just distributing content. The underlying principle of a CDN is that it just moves content around, regardless of what it is.

With Google Fonts, you aren't using a tool to move content around. You're using an API to control an application that manipulates fonts. It just happens to be running on a network that distributes the content around in the background. Google Fonts uses a CDN to give you content, but it's far more complex than a typical CDN, and your use of it is merely to distribute content, but to specifically access and manipulate fonts.

Seems to crash my (Chrome) browser tab pretty consistently after enough scrolling.

I've all sorts of crashes when Chrome has to cope with a lot of data. Don't run my Retina MacBook on 1920x1200 HiDPI any more because of it, and also try to avoid 2880x1800. With regular 1920x1200 it doesn't crawl when you have some 50 tabs open or so. In the other resolutions especially the keyboard interaction and overall stability is affected.

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