Font-Family Recommendations

by birdculture • 26 days ago

76 20 26 days ago

Terretta• 24 days ago

These days you can have an LLM code you up python to custom match visual metrics from your preferred web fonts to the likely user fonts across your statistical user base.

_verandaguy• 23 days ago

But why?

sometimez• 23 days ago

So basically just use monospace, serif, or sans-serif because you can't 100% be sure it'll render correctly?

xigoi3• 23 days ago

Fuck that. I don’t want my website to look ugly because 99.9% of users don’t bother to change the defaults.

kibwen• 23 days ago

This is not at all what the article recommends. I recommend actually reading it.

holsta• 23 days ago

If browsers were slightly better at asking users, maybe we'd all have our three favourite fonts and background-, text- and link-colours instead of what someone else prefers we stare at all day.

porphyra• 23 days ago

If not inlined, subresources can fail to load for all kinds of network reasons.

Also, it's commonly recommended to load fonts asynchronously/deferred without blocking the main page render. But I HATE it when the page jumps around as it cycles through different fonts before the real one loads. I'd rather get dinged on PageSpeed insights with "Requests are blocking the page's initial render, which may delay LCP. Deferring or inlining can move these network requests out of the critical path." rather than have everything popping about for the first second. Is it just me?

chrisweekly• 23 days ago

Def not just you!

cryzinger• 23 days ago

This drove me crazy on one of my (very lightweight) static sites... even on incredibly fast connections you'd always see that FOUT. I managed to solve it with font-display: fallback.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

I also had to make sure I was preloading my fonts properly... not sure if this is the same guide I followed, but it's close. The only difference is that I swapped that "&display=swap" to "&display=fallback":

https://dev.to/pilcrowonpaper/preloading-google-fonts-37h1

gurjeet• 23 days ago

FOUT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content

Grom_PE• 23 days ago

What the hell.

Just now I learned of "font-family: monospace, monospace" hack. Indeed, browsers will render the font smaller with just one "monospace".

I've never run into it before because setting explicit font-size in pt or px avoids that weirdness.

mherkender• 23 days ago

Arial has better support for some locales on desktop devices.

MisterKent• 23 days ago

Do we really need to keep pandering to the people who block JavaScript and fonts?

At some point it's on them to live with their choices. And just from my small sample size (I doubt there's a large sample anywhere), those people are more interested in complaining about their self-inflicted woes than engaging with the content.

/rant

Chu4eeno• 23 days ago

As someone who blocks fonts (with exceptions for icon/symbol fonts, and don't block javascript), I don't really care for pandering.

I only noticed font choices when they were bad, since I started blocking custom fonts the web has become remarkably readable (and consistent).

shimman• 22 days ago

How do you block specific fonts? Do you mean just the CDNs for like say google fonts?

4thguy• 23 days ago

The first few seem like sensible thoughts to me. What if the font doesn't load from the CDN for some reason?

Just add a font fallback.

overvale• 23 days ago

I mean... isn't this the entire point of font-family fallbacks?

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