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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

#81

Post by system2 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #76
system2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intro…

Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second depending on the device type. I think that's off by quite a lot. On my MacBook Pro I can dump one of the Helvetica Neue faces in one second with ttx (fonttools). If a python script can parse a font, create an XML representation, and write a pretty printed version of that to disk in a second then yea 500 ms seems really slow. Hell, typst (rust) can render a…

Google's crawl emulation is based on this:

Emulated Moto G Power with Lighthouse 12.2.0 - Slow 4G throttling.

With slow download and rendering it is probably more than 500ms in my opinion. Either way, I won't leave money on the table and sacrifice 1% better-looking fonts, even if it is for 10ms. Mobile load time is the #1 SEO signal these days and will stay #1 for a long time.

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

#82

Post by dasyatidprime »

idoubtit wrote: post #47
twic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus signs with a wider dash, but that is semantically wrong and also a pain in the arse. In this case, an alternative to "-", U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is "−", U+2212 MINUS SIGN. On Linux, I considered mapping the keypad substract key to it, but instead I configured a xcompose alias. gold +1.2% oil −6.4% corn +5.2%

Re “configured”—what's your locale? In en_US.UTF-8 on my Arch system it's in the system file (/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) as .

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

#84

Post by inferiorhuman »

system2 wrote: post #81
inferiorhuman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second depending on the device type. I think that's off by quite a lot. On my MacBook Pro I can dump one of the Helvetica Neue faces in one second with ttx (fonttools). If a python script can parse a font, create an XML representation, and write a pretty printed version of that to disk in a second then yea 500 ms seems really slow. Hell, typst (rust) can render a…

Google's crawl emulation is based on this: Emulated Moto G Power with Lighthouse 12.2.0 - Slow 4G throttling. With slow download and rendering it is probably more than 500ms in my opinion. Either way, I won't leave money on the table and sacrifice 1% better-looking fonts, even if it is for 10ms. Mobile load time is the #1 SEO signal these days and will stay #1 for a long time.

Right, but your claim was that just processing the font would take 500 ms. No idea what a Moto G Power is or how fast it is, but 500 ms for processing still seems like a pessimistic estimate.

I've no idea what sort of overhead Google adds to font downloads either, but assuming WOFF2 format the font itself should be well under 100k. Granted WOFF2 is fairly new (2018), but it's fairly well supported these days. I'd expect Google Fonts to support it as WOFF2 was Google's attempt at wringing out a bit more optimization out SFNT fonts.

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

#85

Post by amake »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #79

Have a font file you want to investigate? See if it supports whatever features? https://wakamaifondue.com is your friend

And if you want to work with fonts locally I recommend https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools

In particular the `ttx` tool is great for digging into the innards of font files.

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

#86

Post by phforms »

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.

Would also love to see v2 finally get released, since I'm a big fan of Berkeley Mono and would like more weights and widths to make my Emacs look nicer.

From their update in february[1] this year it seems like it is basically complete but personal things got in the way and maybe they struggle to set up the systems for custom builds, ecommerce, etc. to ship it. People are constantly asking for the release, so I think it will eventually arrive, but good things often take longer than expected. :)

[1]: https://x.com/usgraphics/status/1762128387483824160

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

#87

Post by system2 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #84
system2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's crawl emulation is based on this: Emulated Moto G Power with Lighthouse 12.2.0 - Slow 4G throttling. With slow download and rendering it is probably more than 500ms in my opinion. Either way, I won't leave money on the table and sacrifice 1% better-looking fonts, even if it is for 10ms. Mobile load time is the #1 SEO signal these days and will stay #1 for a long time.

Right, but your claim was that just processing the font would take 500 ms. No idea what a Moto G Power is or how fast it is, but 500 ms for processing still seems like a pessimistic estimate. I've no idea what sort of overhead Google adds to font downloads either, but assuming WOFF2 format the font itself should be well under 100k. Granted WOFF2 is fairly new (2018), but it's fairly well supported these days. I'd exp…

Alright, sorry to make it sound like that. Either way, it adds overhead (local or Google) but CDN-loaded ones cause more issues. Google Fonts is the web's standard for non-system fonts and indeed it adds CSS, JS, additional requests, and the font itself, including wait times due to download and load. SEO is a competitive environment, even a single request, and ms counts. Small blogs might not care but if your website gets traffic, those little millisecond differences rank your posts differently.

Our pages are around 80kb in total (yes you are reading correctly, not 800kb but 80kb including images of the blog posts, including the WebP images, javascript, CSS, and the HTML file itself. Imagine doubling or quadrupling it just for a font. That would be insanity. 100kb font size is absurd if you want your mobile speed (#1 SEO factor today) to be better.

Core Web Vitals scores us 100% for everything. This drops to 80%~ when we use external fonts. We tried 100s of different metrics. The font is a major factor (again, doesn't matter local or Google). Added overhead is going to sink your ranks like a rock.

For anyone reading this, do not use Google fonts if you want your SEO to be better.

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

#88

Post by zelphirkalt »

3836293648 wrote: post #14
zelphirkalt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't expect the big four to use their immeasurable wealth for the common good, now can we? If anyone, then distro creators and maintainers will have to make that step. Google surely enjoys getting so much information due to hapless users loading Googlefonts on websites.

Which is why France's interpretation of the GDPR banned it

In some important areas France has better laws than other EU countries. Another example I believe was about avoiding wasting food on the supply chain of food to supermarkets and what happens with food afterwards.

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

#89

Post by sswezey »

phforms wrote: post #86
cflewis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would also love to see v2 finally get released, since I'm a big fan of Berkeley Mono and would like more weights and widths to make my Emacs look nicer. From their update in february[1] this year it seems like it is basically complete but personal things got in the way and maybe they struggle to set up the systems for custom builds, ecommerce, etc. to ship it. People are constantly asking for the release, so I think…

Houston Mono has also been indefinitely delayed...

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

#90

Post by lofaszvanitt »

system2 wrote: post #60
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intro…

Well, subset the fonts, remove unnecessary flavors, move the font to your own cdn. Problem solved. If this affects SEO... oh dear god, the internet became a sh*thole.
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