Google Fonts: more than a trillion served • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#61

Post by Silhouette » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 8:33 AM UTC

ars_technician wrote: post #32

pandringa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.

Logged visits to sites they would otherwise not get. Font request+referrer is useful information.

If you're concerned about your own privacy in this respect, you can install a plug-in for most browsers that will prevent a real Referer being sent with your requests. Google will still serve you the web font, they just won't know which page you were viewing at the time.

(I'm not making any comment on Google's general strategy or how many people would actually understand that they might wish to protect their privacy in this way, just pointing out that it can be done.)

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#62

Post by Silhouette » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 8:42 AM UTC

markdown wrote: post #23

putlake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads). Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.…

Don't put anything more than 10KB into a CSS file as a data URI.

Where does this limit come from?

IE8 can handle up to 32KB[1], and more recent versions of all major browsers appear to have much higher limits. IE7 and below didn't support data: anyway.

[1] See http://caniuse.com/datauri, and confirmed by Microsoft's own technical documentation.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#63

Post by dkuntz2 » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 9:09 AM UTC

eps wrote: post #55

notJim wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator . Upload a font and get back a kit with everything you need.

Yeah, try it with Droid Sans, compare the results, report back. @font-face generators are dime a dozen. The issue is that they generate kits of subpar quality for Google fonts.

Most of the time Font Squirrel has them made already, and you don't need to convert the already stripped down fonts from Google's severs...

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#64

Post by DannyBee » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 9:24 AM UTC

eps wrote: post #56

DannyBee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The motivations, as far as i know, are written on the about page: "A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. " Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications." If you have some actual evidence that the last part isn't…

Your naivety is adoring.

If you want to skip the personal attacks and explain

1. What "trillions of visits logged" means, exactly. IE what you think is being logged past a request for a font.

2. What you think the data is actually used for

The web font loader is open source, so this should not be too hard to explain what it's sending that you think is valuable and why.

Or you know, you could just continue on with meaningless ad-hominen attacks, since well, you never responded to anything i asked.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#65

Post by DigitalSea » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 9:38 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #47

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what s…

This. It's worth pointing out that the antialiasing issue only affects Windows PC's. But this is very much a font issue us developers have to hack around. -webkit-font-smoothing and setting the value to antialiased sometimes fixes this issue.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#66

Post by npunt » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 10:22 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #60

npunt wrote: post #47

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what s…

I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. On a similar note, caution is needed when using Helvetica in a web font stack. On Windows PCs, this could easily select a low quality screen font that was installed with a printer driver in preference to Arial. Designers who work on Apple gear, where specifying Helvetica tends to find a standard system font that…

Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#67

Post by thristian » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 11:37 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #66

Silhouette wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. On a similar note, caution is needed when using Helvetica in a web font stack. On Windows PCs, this could easily select a low quality screen font that was installed with a printer driver in preference to Arial. Designers who work on Apple gear, where specifying Helvetica tends to find a standard system font that…

Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;

Yes, because "Helvetica" is listed before "Arial", and some people have a bogus "Helvetica" installed.

If you just want a nice, legible sans-serif font, just put "font-family: sans-serif" into your CSS, and you should universally get a pretty good choice.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#68

Post by andypotts » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 11:46 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #47

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what s…

The only reason I came onto this article was to post this. Thank-you for saving me some time.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#69

Post by yen223 » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 1:07 PM UTC

DigitalSea wrote: post #65

npunt wrote: post #47

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what s…

This. It's worth pointing out that the antialiasing issue only affects Windows PC's. But this is very much a font issue us developers have to hack around. -webkit-font-smoothing and setting the value to antialiased sometimes fixes this issue.

The weirdest part is that, Firefox on Windows renders those fonts fine.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#70

Post by jonknee » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 1:41 PM UTC

eps wrote: post #53

jonknee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source): https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts > You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server. Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move…

> Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself. Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.

... All the fonts are open source, you can quite literally use Google's native versions. It's not exactly rocket science. You want Droid Sans?

http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/droidsans/v...