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What you can get out of a high-quality font

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Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#51

Post by nativeit »

emchammer wrote: post #21
jfdjkfdhjds wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the year of the lord 2024 and OSes still don't ship with a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode like nerdfonts. shameful. I wish all the effort the big four wasted fighting for emoji supremacy would have been used to normalize a decent set of full unicode fonts once and for all.

Wow, is Inter ever a beautiful typeface. A rare find when there seemed to be a glut of corporate NIH typefaces for a while. macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin…

Inter quickly became my go-to sans serif font for the web. In A/B tests it somehow always looks better than anything, frequently by wide margins—which is saying something when you’re basically running through a dozen variations on Helvetica.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#53

Post by nine_k »

fsckboy wrote: post #38
adrian_b wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabular numerals are very useful in certain cases, but I find even more useful the old-style numerals. By default, I always use old-style numerals, because they are much easier to read, especially for big numbers, for the same reason why the lowercase letters are easier to read, by having ascenders and descenders that break the uniformity of the characters. I use lining numerals only in the same places where I would…

> I find even more useful the old-style numerals A font of antiquated faſhion doth boaſt moſt excellent and ſubſtantious qualities, yet prithee, what of olde ſtyle figures doſt thou deem hath benefit that I, in mine own diſcretion, might chooſeth?

Set thy eyes on this excellent Font, for Inſtance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(typeface)#/media/Fi...

As can be moſt clearly ſeen, the Numerals are not of equale Height, but poſſeſs Deſcendants, like the 4, and Aſcendants, like the 6.

Shouldſt thou deſire to embelliſh thy Layout with ſuch a Rendition of Numerals, thou canst: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...

This Feature requireth though that the Font ſo employed containéd the proper Variants of the numeral Glyphs. Many a diſtinguished Font do.

(Pray note that the -th Ending of Verbs is for Singular Third Perſon Form, not to be uſed with "thou". I do, thou dost, he doth.)

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#54

Post by TheRealPomax »

WillAdams wrote: post #27
TheRealPomax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all fonts commonly used today support most if not all of this (except for variable axes, because that's still a relatively new development)

Variable Axes have been around since Adobe Multiple Masters in the mid to early 90s: https://web.archive.org/web/20091223045132/http://partners.a...

But the "fvar" table [1], as part of the OpenType specification, has not.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/f...

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#55

Post by airstrike »

twic wrote: post #41
airstrike wrote: post #4

Tabular numerals are such a valuable feature. It's a bummer they're not more prevalent.

I like tabular numerals. But you really need a small set of other glyphs to be tabular to really make them work. In particular, you need the plus and minus signs to be the same width, so that in a table like: gold +1.2% oil -6.4% corn +5.2% everything lines up and looks nice. At the moment, with CSS, there's no way to make that happen, and in normal typefaces the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus…

I hear you. Back when I was in Investment Banking, I was guilty of replacing hyphens with en dashes in all sorts of labels to make them line up properly in a table... It wasn't perfect, but it was a decent improvement

Generally, numbers were right-aligned in cells, so the % at the end was consistent (when present) and the plus/minus before the numbers didn't make a difference because of the alignment. But labels on the left like in some P&L or Cash Flow statement were always annoying

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#58

Post by xelamonster »

ashton314 wrote: post #11

If you like typography, check out Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/ It's full of good, pragmatic advice on how to make printed and digital documents look wonderful. I've bought two fonts from him and his font license is easily the most permissive of any paid professional font I've seen: no restrictions on the number of page views or anything, unlike most other pro fonts. Are his fonts…

Nice thanks! I'm happy to pay for a good font but the page view restrictions and all have always bothered me. Not a fan of the idea that they might end up extorting large sums out of you down the line if your site becomes popular or if you want to to build an app with the font to keep your branding consistent.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#59

Post by xelamonster »

cflewis wrote: post #56
kstrauser wrote: post #39

This was my nudge to see if Berkeley Mono v2 is out yet. It is not.

Yeah, I'm waiting to see if BM condensed ever arrives. I am thinking it won't. I don't think it would take this long if they really intended to get v2 out the door. It's vaporware.

BM condensed, where does that land on the Bristol stool scale? Sorry I couldn't resist.

I am actually curious about this though, the Berkeley Mono font I found with a search does look quite nice. What's the deal with v2?

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#60

Post by system2 »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #52
system2 wrote: post #42

Maybe for print, it is important but for the web, we must stick to system fonts for SEO and speed.

How does font type influence SEO and speed!?

Loading a font can cause multiple things including load time delay. For example, connecting to Google and downloading a Lato font is around 4-5 requests + js + CSS files + 500kb added download.

Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second depending on the device type.

We keep the total requests under 25, which cannot be done after multiple 3rd party fonts are added.

Additionally, some fonts can introduce CLS (content layout shift) after the font is loaded. Especially H tags because they shift a lot. CLS = your SEO is dead.

For speed purposes, especially mobile, using a 3rd party font is SEO suicide.

The sites we build for our clients are below 1.2 second mobile and 0.2 second desktop load time which gives these sites an enormous SEO advantage. These load times are complete loads, not initial draws or TTFBs. (results are provided by Google page speed insights - https://pagespeed.web.dev/) These load times change when we use the client's own fonts or the ones they pick from Google fonts. We have this discussion almost every time we onboard a new client.

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