21–30 of 42 posts
Really cool article. But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have exploded in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition. I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. An entire…
Hey, that's Marcin Wichary! He's the creator of GUIdebook, a really nifty desktop GUI comparison site. It hasn't been updated in almost a decade and a half, but it's still really neat. https://guidebookgallery.org/
> But the internet leaves no room for someone with a pencil. I've never personally seen it done, but couldn't you do this with the Unicode Private-Use Area? Assuming you have your own blog where you control the CSS, you could sprinkle in a few private-use codepoints, and then add a custom web font to the CSS font fallback that defines glyphs for those same codepoints. (I know putting a document with Private-Use codep…
One thing this article doesn’t mention is that the two font file formats used on the web (TTF/OTF and WOFF) can’t contain more than 65,536 glyphs. Which I suspect is the main reason the Noto font caps out at ~64,000 characters on that bar chart of how many characters are in some fonts. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-WOFF2-20180301/#DataTypes
> font-family: Joanna, Helvetica Now, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; Why would someone fallback from a serif font (Joanna) to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif?
One thing this article doesn’t mention is that the two font file formats used on the web (TTF/OTF and WOFF) can’t contain more than 65,536 glyphs. Which I suspect is the main reason the Noto font caps out at ~64,000 characters on that bar chart of how many characters are in some fonts. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-WOFF2-20180301/#DataTypes
> But the internet leaves no room for someone with a pencil. I've never personally seen it done, but couldn't you do this with the Unicode Private-Use Area? Assuming you have your own blog where you control the CSS, you could sprinkle in a few private-use codepoints, and then add a custom web font to the CSS font fallback that defines glyphs for those same codepoints. (I know putting a document with Private-Use codep…
• Screen readers won’t be able to do anything with it;
• Some mobile users especially will turn off web font loading;
• Even if custom fonts are enabled, it’s not terribly uncommon for them to fail to load for any number of reasons;
• It’s best for performance if you can do something like `font-display: optional` or `font-display: fallback`; but if you are actually depending on glyphs in your font, you can’t do this. (For that font, anyway; if you use a custom font for just that range, you could still make any custom body text font optional, though at the cost of an extra request for the private use font rather than it being embedded in the rest.)
> font-family: Joanna, Helvetica Now, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; Why would someone fallback from a serif font (Joanna) to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif?
I would much rather have your custom font and then sans-serif, with nothing in between. Let me use your web font, or use my sans-serif, which is probably one of the fonts you listed in your fallback order anyway, but this way if I’ve expressed my own preference (I have) then these other Helveticas and Arials don’t get in the way.
The real problem with the fallback stack is that there’s no way of adjusting things depending on the font used. Perhaps web font A is about 10% larger than system font B, you really want to be able to say “bump the font size and line height by 10% if you have to fall back to B”; but you can’t.
So for simple fallbacks (of the “if this font is unavailable” type, rather than the “if this glyph is unavailable in this font” type), the main reason to add fonts between your font and serif/sans-serif is to match sizes better.
Then in the case of monospace, the problem is that some (most?) platforms have a default that most find ugly (e.g. Courier New), so I can more readily understand people preferring to opt into prettier fonts offered by the platforms, even if I wish they wouldn’t do it.
I'm on ubuntu and see tofus a lot. Is there some way to make it use the same fallbacks mac/windows use? For example stuff in this article doesn't render well for me (see the caption of the image): https://imgur.com/a/aFDSKyG