Comments on: Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font Ignorance

By: Font Hinting Explained By A Font Design Master

Font Hinting Explained By A Font Design Master — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:50:34 +0000

[...] environments they’ve cared about, Type 1 and OpenType CFF fonts render perfectly well on screen: Boing-Boing-Redesign-Uncovers-Web-Font-Ignorance Just about any application on the Mac OS. Adobe Acrobat, InDesign and Illustrator, on any platform. [...]

By: Henk Gianotten

Henk Gianotten — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:50:12 +0000

I think, there is another major problem by using BPreplay. The lack of characters for non-English languages. It has only 207 characters and only Greek users can display a fair number of their characters. Different character sets and different encodings can increase these problems too. Boing Boing does not know when they want (or have) to show these “strange characters”. In my opinion their designers (and/or web technicians) did a very bad job.

By: Sex, lies, & type | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog

Sex, lies, & type | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:22:08 +0000

[...] Let’s hope the other browser vendors get behind it, and start implementing support for WOFF. Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font IgnoranceWhere to get Web fontsBetter Postscript CFF font rendering with DirectWrite.Typotheque has now [...]

By: A giant step for typography on the Web | Type Directors Club

A giant step for typography on the Web | Type Directors Club — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:21:42 +0000

[...] boingboing.net is a high-profile early adopter of this technology, with mixed reviews and results. This article by Thomas Phinney goes through some of the issues that have come up with BoingBoing’s implementation of the [...]

By: New developments in web fonts | Type Directors Club

New developments in web fonts | Type Directors Club — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:53:37 +0000

By: Lindsey Thomas Martin

Lindsey Thomas Martin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:50:21 +0000

Very helpful article. Thank you. When I read: ‘many foundries are still trying to figure out how to approach the web fonts conundrum. Will they license fonts for use on web servers directly? Will they do so but specify security requirements that can’t be met by sticking regular desktop fonts on web servers’, it occurred to me that this may be something to which Extensis could apply its expertise in managing fonts.

LTM

By: Sex, lies, & type | meshdairy

Sex, lies, & type | meshdairy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:22:10 +0000

[...] WOFF sample page — you will need the latest development version of FireFox to actually see the fonts at work (or wait until FF 3.6). Let’s hope the other browser vendors get behind it, and start implementing support for WOFF. Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font Ignorance [...]

By: Sex, lies, & type | More On Design

Sex, lies, & type | More On Design — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:22:07 +0000

By: Sex, lies, & type | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog

Sex, lies, & type | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:25:32 +0000

By: Barney

Barney — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:22:33 +0000

“Type 1 and OpenType CFF fonts render perfectly well on screen: * Just about any application on the Mac OS.”

Have they patched Snow Leopard? http://www.macuser.co.uk/news/268417

[Not yet. But that issue is only with Type 1, and the problem doesn't make Type 1 fonts render poorly... just gives them possibly different line spacing than on Snow Leopard compared to other versions of Mac OS. That wouldn't matter too much for web pages, but being a problem for Type 1 only (not OpenType CFF) it doesn't affect web fonts, anyway. — T]

Great article, covers pretty much all the factors necessary to conscientious font-family strings for web. Nice one!

I think being wary of free fonts is a pretty superstitious (and political) way of going about things – but that opinion deserves an airing in its own right.

[Superstition is something lacking basis in fact. If one accepts my statement that 98% of free fonts suck (and you may disagree), it is not superstition but pragmatism to be cautious of them as a category. Political? Sure, it has political implications. But I've always been happy to praise those high quality free fonts out there, too. — T]

The way to avoid all the symptoms described is simply (as you said) to test thoroughly across platforms & user agents. Personally, I fail to see how this can be an optional nice-to-have in web design.

There are way too many Mac-based web designers who don’t try their wares on any version of IE before releasing – the biggest evidence for this being variations of T1 Lucida Sans on otherwise perfectly beautiful sites looking utterly illegible to Windows users at anything under 18px.

[No question that we agree on the necessity of testing. But aside from that, web fonts are a brave new frontier for web designers at the moment; significant mistakes are to be expected for a while yet, though one expects them to be caught in testing. — T]