121–130 of 417 posts
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/system-font-stack/
where you have a list of system fonts across platforms that for serif, sans-serif and monospace. always looks good & no extra downloads
Does this mean that all CDN hosting of libraries, etc. will now be semi pointless for optimization?
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firefox options -> language and appearance -> advanced -> uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above'
Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons? It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...
In Firefox, disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" does not completely block web fonts (as setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false would); what it does is to prioritise the default fonts, and move any page-specified fonts to the end of the fallback list.
This means that for "normal" text, the browser's default fonts will be used, but if there are Private Use Area character codes that are only supported by the site's custom webfont, it'll still get used for those. So icon fonts that are based on PUA code points will still work.
What doesn't work in this scenario is when the icon font doesn't encode its icons in the PUA, but uses normal Unicode characters -- either symbol code points that are supported by the system's default fonts, or as some icon fonts do, regular English words that then use ligature rules to produce the icon glyphs. (So the icon font contains OpenType mappings such as "phone" -> [phone icon].) In this case the content on the page will end up rendered using the default font instead.
[Edited: HN doesn't let me include an actual phone icon there, apparently.]
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Yes, it's just an Open Type file. The usual omitted stuff is subsetting a bigger font to include only certain glyphs you need, usually you don't mutilate font by removing rendering data from glyphs.
Yes, it's just a container for the exact same data that an OpenType font holds. On the other hand, it's possible that in the course of deployment, various things may be dropped from the original font resource: not just subsetting (reducing the repertoire of supported characters), but in some cases also OpenType features (e.g. ligatures or contextual forms), and in some cases hinting is stripped. If that is done, the…
Is this really done?
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Yes, it's just a container for the exact same data that an OpenType font holds. On the other hand, it's possible that in the course of deployment, various things may be dropped from the original font resource: not just subsetting (reducing the repertoire of supported characters), but in some cases also OpenType features (e.g. ligatures or contextual forms), and in some cases hinting is stripped. If that is done, the…
What lunatic would strip hinting!? Is this really done?
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The cleaner look is because most designers use macOS which renders most fonts in a way that makes them all look good (let’s not get into technical details). On Windows the same fonts might look like shit (for example some parts of a character are thicker than the rest for no apparent reason)
Its actually incredible how ugly fonts render on windows. After using linux for so long I thought I was experiencing a bug when seeing fonts on windows.
In my recollection (and it's been a few years since I used a Linux GUI) Linux was the one with dodgy font rendering.
It's infuriating to see so much web tech being discarded created during the 90s and 00s in good faith, just because the web was subverted into an app delivery platform (in this case, shared caches were obsoleted by timing attacks) and the arms race for ever more crap to counter the negative effects, insufficiently. The web may now be a platform to lock-in and enslave users; just isn't anymore a recommendable place fo…
Does this mean that all CDN hosting of libraries, etc. will now be semi pointless for optimization?
I'd also point out that Google CDNs don't work in China and make your websites broken for 1/5th of the world's population. (Not to mention your leaking your user's info to Google - which is a dick move..)
Perhaps blocking a big part of the internet is the real dick move?
Mainly for performance reasons I've recently gone from using hosted/local Google Fonts to just calling the system ones (some variant of `-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Oxygen,Ubuntu,Cantarell,Open Sans,Helvetica Neue`).
Something like this is really popular, covers most cases and older systems/browsers and even emojis: `ui-sans-serif,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Helvetica Neue,Arial,Noto Sans,sans-serif,Apple Color Emoji,Segoe UI Emoji,Segoe UI Symbol,Noto Color Emoji` For brand-specific fonts though, I highly recommend cleaning the font files from any characters/features you don't need, and then just s…