Font in your face

http://nimbupani.com/blog/font-in-your-face.html

by deepakjois • 17 years ago

13 12 17 years ago

nimbupani.com

good overview/background around the @font-face debates

deepakjois• 17 years ago

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

sielskr• 17 years ago

Too long; didn't read.

moe3• 17 years ago

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...

adw• 17 years ago

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.

moe3• 17 years ago

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".

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

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.

nimbupani4• 17 years ago

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.

dflock• 17 years ago

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

nimbupani4• 17 years ago

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.

Font in your face

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