31 Web Fonts, Commercial Fonts, and Metrics

I like the idea of more font choices but agree that bad design will probably get worse. Although, this would probably create a greater need for talented web designers or at the very least help to separate the good from the bad.

A few things that ran through my mind:

1. It would be nice to have a variety of web fonts that have been created and categorized by their metrics to match up with our current set of fonts. This would help a page degrade nicely in older browsers with minimal fiddling around.

2. Web fonts do not address the issue of commercial fonts used in corporate identities. A logo or other branding that is font-specific would still need to be an image.

posted at 08:19 pm on August 28, 2007 by Dana Larson

32 Why TrueType?

If you limit this to TrueType it seems to me you immediately make it obsolete. Why not make OpenType fonts compatible as well? Most Mac systems use OpenType.

posted at 09:14 pm on August 28, 2007 by Bruce Hiles

33 Industry Interests?

Seems to me that web fonts will be seen by some of the major foundries as a threat, since inevitably people will use commercial fonts (even though it’s technically illegal), and font piracy will become even easier than it is now.

posted at 09:24 pm on August 28, 2007 by Gabe da Silveira

34 sIFR

@ Håkon (#17) –

from (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/):

sIFR is fully accessible to screenreaders and other assistive technology. Don’t take our word for it. Ask Matt May of the W3C who endorses it as an accessible method to create rich typography on the web. Or ask Joe Clark, one of the world’s leading accessibility experts, whose interest in typography is only trumped by his interest in accessibility.

So then is you only issue with the currently available flash solution is that it isn’t an open standard? I’d say this is a small price to pay for something that actually works, now.

Otherwise all we are talking about are cool things that browsers should implement. In which case, we can come up with a very long list.

posted at 09:36 pm on August 28, 2007 by Seth Green

35 Give 'em a Choice

Implementing a choice for designers to specify fonts is no different than any other presentation choices CSS gives you. There will, as always, be bad design. Let’s not rule out the possibility of good design in a fit of ideology.

Besides, adding this choice may spur the creation of many more fonts that do work well on the web, expanding the web font set tremendously.

posted at 09:41 pm on August 28, 2007 by Bruce Hiles

36 Interest, open fonts and more

#33 Gabe: yes, there are big corporations interests in typography, mainly from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and major foundries. But to deny this mechanism to designers is like denying the ability to see images because it is potentially a way to infringe images’ copyrights.

I always laugh at people saying “why give designer another toy?, there will be a lot of crappy designs!”. It’s as absurd as saying “why give programmers object oriented programming or APIs?, they’ll end up writing crappy code!”
What’s important here (and what everybody needs to understand) is:

To have the ability to specify a TrueType (or another, free, standard font format) in a web page will not make a page less readable, will not affect accesibility (content is separated from format, remember? and you’ll have the ability to turn custom fonts off), will not affect the existing amount of crappy design (crappy design happens, either you have downloadable fonts or not), will contribute to more pleasant and readable design, will save bandwith from images used as text, will save designers from using obscure or propietary solutions to display fonts (like sIfr or Flash) and will not affect users using old browsers, since it would degrade.

I want to stress that, if this is one of the most petitioned features by designers, it’s not because we want a new toy to play with. Fonts are at the core of our profession, are the building blocks we use to form words. It’s difficult to explain how important fonts can be to a designer, but to put it simple, typography is a way to transmit personality through text in a subtle way, without interfering with the message.

And also, it’s very important that designers create suitable fonts either for display and text to be send on the web. We need to show companies and foundries that we are going to respect their copyrights. That we can generate our own font to use. And those fonts need to be published under the Open Font License.

posted at 10:25 pm on August 28, 2007 by Damian Vila

37 utf-08 fonts

Besides design web fonts can be served from the server to display languages such as Sumerian, Cypriot Syllabary and many other languages of academic interest that are not currently available, unless the user has them installed on his computer. (Not to mention better support for dingbats, diagritical marks and the like).

I am all for the idea to incorporate web fonts into browsers and if IE can do that quicker than anyone else I will ditch my favourite FF!

posted at 11:18 pm on August 28, 2007 by yannis lazarides

40 Untitled

“This doesn’t work in browsers today. Prince is the only application where it works, but it’s not a browser. If you want to play today, you must install Prince.”

Aside from the rounded corners, the first three examples render properly for me. Why is that? (Firefox 2.0.0.6 Ubuntu Feisty)

posted at 12:25 am on August 29, 2007 by shawn price