171–180 of 191 posts
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So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be tracked without cookies being sent, while "access to the data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I lost my trust in google a long time ago.
"Users can be tracked without cookies being sent" How? Stylesheets can't use fingerprinting or Flash cookies or anything like that, only scripts can.
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> Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch Am I understanding this correctly to mean that you were part of a group that invented this font? Independent of the great work you obviously did on everything else, if this is correct, I just wanted to give a specific thank you for that! It's been my go-to font for my terminal, text editor, monospace font in the browser, and even the font my Linux machines…
No, I drew Inconsolata myself, as well as inventing spiral-based tools for designing fonts, as an alternative to Béziers. I started work on it far in advance of working on the "Google Font API" as it was called at launch, so it was very natural to include it, along with other great fonts by other talented designers. I'm glad you like the font!
Man, I love your phd thesis! I use it regularly to show my students an example of what a PhD is supposed to be; and, independently, to teach them some planar differential geometry. Your study of Euler's elastica is the best written account of it that exists (and I have read many more geometry books that would like to admit).
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Also there's a addon called "decentraleyes" that will cache fonts, amongst other things. It's one of 3 extensions I install in every browser I'm allowed to. The others are uBlock origin and https everywhere. All 3 have good privacy/security/performance benefits with effectively no breakage, in their default configurations.
Decentraleyes is an excellent add-on that improves browsing speed and privacy with no negative side effects. Currently, the only font cached by Decentraleyes is Noto Sans. It also caches Google's Web Font Loader script and many major JavaScript frameworks. https://decentraleyes.org https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes Web developers who are concerned about privacy exposure from Google Fonts can use google-webfo…
Why are people still bothering with Google fonts? They were useful when font formats hadn't been standardized, and you needed WOFF, TTF, and SVG for some Apple products. Now, WOFF works everywhere, and you can offer WOFF2, which is compressed more. So why not just put the fonts on your own site and avoid a side trip to Google?
Also, Google Fonts does more than just delivering a font to the browser - the text= and font subset features can reduce the download size a lot, which you couldn't do if you were serving the Woff2 yourself on a dynamic site (eg you didn't know what characters were needed before the page rendered on the server or client).
Lastly,for common fonts like Roboto and Open Sans, there's a non-zero chance it'll already be in the user's cache. That's a win.
I was part of the team that founded this, about 10 years ago if memory serves. I'm still loosely involved, though no longer at Google. Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch, and we're now in the process of launching it as a variable font, with both width and weight axes. I'm also getting funding from them for Rust-based font tools. Feel free to AMA, though no guarantees I'll have good answers.
Re: variable fonts. What’s the rule of thumb on file size ... is 1 variable font smaller than 1 normal font? Or is it more like 1 variable font is smaller than 3 normal fonts combined (eg bold, italic, regular).
The compression ratio varies depending on how the variable font was made though. E.g. Noto Sans clocks in at 1.5 MB because it is made from 8 masters for two axes. Reducing it to 5 masters results in a 900 KB binary.
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Lots of "browse the web from this phone box" and "the departures board in the train station that shows a webpage" will be Linux. I bet many of them use Google Fonts, and with them auto-refreshing every 5 seconds all day long, they might get seriously overcounted.
I doubt that the fonts get reloaded when the page is refreshed. According to other posts in this thread, the cache TTL is 24 hours.
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> Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch Am I understanding this correctly to mean that you were part of a group that invented this font? Independent of the great work you obviously did on everything else, if this is correct, I just wanted to give a specific thank you for that! It's been my go-to font for my terminal, text editor, monospace font in the browser, and even the font my Linux machines…
No, I drew Inconsolata myself, as well as inventing spiral-based tools for designing fonts, as an alternative to Béziers. I started work on it far in advance of working on the "Google Font API" as it was called at launch, so it was very natural to include it, along with other great fonts by other talented designers. I'm glad you like the font!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I drew Inconsolata myself, as well as inventing spiral-based tools for designing fonts, as an alternative to Béziers. I started work on it far in advance of working on the "Google Font API" as it was called at launch, so it was very natural to include it, along with other great fonts by other talented designers. I'm glad you like the font!
> No, I drew Inconsolata myself, as well as inventing spiral-based tools for designing fonts, as an alternative to Béziers. Man, I love your phd thesis! I use it regularly to show my students an example of what a PhD is supposed to be; and, independently, to teach them some planar differential geometry. Your study of Euler's elastica is the best written account of it that exists (and I have read many more geometry bo…