I'd be using Cufon, but I can't justify the text. I've read that Typeface.js works similarly to Cufon, (renders its own text so it looks good in Windows browsers that don't provide anti-aliasing) so I'd like to know how the rendering quality compares (Cufon's is great) and if you can justify text--no mention that you can or can't on the Typeface.js homesite that I could find... Thanks!
Maybe you know it already but there is also Google Font that does the same thing as Cufon and Typeface, except there is a limited choice of fonts (you cannot upload whichever you like). However, it does support "justify" + it's clean and fast.
Related
For my current workflow I use iconic web fonts generated with the Icomoon. It’s a very easy and fun technique with an obvious advantages:
Icon behaves just like any other glyph, so any text CSS transformations can be applied to it in a natural way, like text-shadow, text-decoration, color etc.
Easy reuse, just add necessary font-family to element.
But it has major flaws do not let me sleep.
Font icons are blurry no matter how perfectly its curves are aligned to a pixel grid. Not to mention awful Windows rendering.
It’s hard to add new icons to the font, especially when vector source font is made from is not available and even lost.
It requires bunch of different font versions (woff, eot, ttf) for acceptable cross-browser support.
In the end fonts are not really for graphics at all (especially not monochrome), it seems to not the right way to use dummy empty and non-semantic <span class="icon"></span> for this purpose.
Well, the obvious alternative is SVG, which has no mentioned disadvantages. But has it’s own flaws, which do not let me use it’s easily.
A lot of small files are quite simply not acceptable in our HTTP/1.1 era.
Creating of icon modification is not an easy task and requires manual editing, which is also rather strange for our just-type-npm-install era.
I've googled for some npm packages which hasn’t satisfied me for some reasons.
So, I’m asking your advice how to manage this trivial and routine task. Is there productive and reliable way to generate SVG sprites with modified variations of original icon and bitmap fallback for old browser?
It doesn't make sense to talk about "supporting old browsers" without:
knowing what the majority of your users will be on (which'll be multiple browsers of course), and,
what support for the feature you want to use is for those browsers, for which we can use the handy http://caniuse.com
With that said, this is not going to be an answer so much as an explanation of how all those points you present "against" fonts are unfounded. Answers are great, but in this case we need to set the record straight so you can make real decisions based on facts, instead of (either "never", or "no longer" valid) preconceptions. I spent way too many years of my life working with fonts from an engineering perspective to let you maintain these claims =)
"Font icons are blurry no matter how perfectly its curves are aligned to a pixel grid. Not to mention awful Windows rendering."
This is plain old not true. As vector graphics, if they render poorly, SVG will also render poorly at the same size, although SVG will typically render worse: fonts actually allow for micro-outline-optimizations for dealing with small point sizes (.otf is better at this than .ttf, but the font maker needs to have spent the time to put them in. Pretty much all professional fonts come with that work done), and SVG doesn't, because it has no instructions in its vector graphics language to do so. As such, fonts render either on par with (if they have no optimization instructions), or better than (if they do) SVG.
For example, Font-Awesome comes with outline optimization that allows it to render pixel-perfect all the way down to a font size of 14px, which is already smaller than what browsers use as default size for text on a page (virtually all browsers agree to use a default of 16px serif). If you took its icon set and converted it to SVG, then tried to use those scaled down to match a 14px size, they would look an absolute blurry mess.
Or you can use an icon set that goes further, such as Symbol Set which has explicitly been designed for grid alignment, which means that even at sizes lower than intended, it still renders remarkably crisply.
SVG loses here.
As for Windows rendering, it might look bad, but that's not Windows's fault. Both Uniscribe and DirectWrite are really good at rendering fonts. Like, really good (which may not be a surprise, since Desktop Publishing has traditionally been Microsoft's core business since pretty much its beginnings, although that's shifting). Browsers that hook into them render fonts really well: IE has even supported web fonts since IE4... That's 1997. That's before HTML4 was even a thing, we were still on HTML3.2 at the time.
The problem isn't so much "Windows", as it's "older browser that are not IE, on Windows". Browsers didn't really care about web fonts for a very long time. It's only the last few years that major effort has suddenly gone into making sure they come with good Font shaping engines (like Harfbuzz, which is now used by Firefox and Chrome), and you won't get nice results for Fonts unless you're using a modern version of "not-IE" on a Windows machine.
And then finally a problem specific for "font vs SVG" on Windows and IE: While IE has supported web fonts since pretty much forever, SVG support only landed in IE9, so if you need to support IE8, you can't even use SVG. In the case for this very specific target audience, "fonts vs. SVG" isn't even a question, you have to go with a font.
"It’s hard to add new icons to the font, especially when vector source font is made from is not available and even lost."
No it isn't, you're still using HTML with CSS, so do what we always do when we need "letters not in this font": use font-fallback: font-family: iconfont1, iconfont2, iconetc.
"It requires bunch of different font versions (woff, eot, ttf) for acceptable cross-browser support."
Not for a few years now. These days we do not need multiple sources: caniuse shows us that everything supports WOFF and has done so for a few versions.
Even IE, although if you need to support IE8 you'll have to also find yourself an .eot (which is literally just a ttf file with an extra bit of metadata so IE will accept it... just like WOFF!) and then live with the fact that if this requires a conversion from otf to eot, you're going to end up with a shitty font because it's a lossy conversion (like converting .png to jpg. Excellent conversion software can generate a decent result, normal software will generate a mediocre result).
And because everything supports WOFF, we (thankfully) don't need ridiculous all-encompassing sets of ttf+otf+eot+woff+svg anymore, with a "bulletproof" #font-face rule that tries to optimize load order so not too many files are needlessly loaded - just use WOFF. Done. And in a pickle, add .eot as first source (with format indicator) and everything except IE will skip over it.
It's also worth looking at SVG font support: virtually nothing supports it, and those that do are in the process of deprecating it. SVG fonts as a thing has been discontinued because the results of using SVG fonts turned out to be incredibly much worse than using real fonts, underlining the explanation on point 1.
"In the end fonts are not really for graphics at all (especially not
monochrome), it seems to not the right way to use dummy empty and
non-semantic <span class="icon"></span> for this purpose."
Both of these claims are incorrect.
Fonts are for encoding vector graphics that are to be used in typesetting context. That can mean letters, or icons, or emoji; it can even be musical notes or mahjong tiles. And the way they do this has until very recently been as "single color", which is literally what monochrome is. The only place where monochrome rendering for fonts might be a problem is on monochrome monitors in which case: where the hell are your webpages being accessed that they can render webfonts, but do so on ancient-even-for-CRT technology O_O
As for semantics: if you need an icon that has no meaning inside the document and is purely UI candy then you do want a non-semantic element, so that text readers and the like for people with visual or reading disabilities don't get your icon read out loud to them, and text indexers for search engines (private or public) can safely ignore them entirely. Your icon should definitely be a non-semantic empty element that can be skipped by everything.
With all that said, what about bitmaps?
Bitmaps absolutely win at low point sizes, but—and this may be a surprise—fonts can actually contain embedded bitmaps so that they can render actual bitmaps, not vector graphics, at small point sizes.
Of course, only high grade fonts come with those, but that's also a thing you check for: does the icon font you're looking at come with bitmaps? If so, we have a winner. If not, then you might want to take the icon font you want to use, generate your icons as a bitmap file, and then manually clean up the bitmap before using it on your site.
This process is inherently manual, no utiltiy will do this for you and not get it wrong enough times that you still need to manually fix things up, but if you do go down this route, and you make your own icons based on a well known font, at a point size that makes the icons look better than the font rendering: give back to the world and send those bitmaps back to the font creators so that they can use them to build out the font's EBLC, EBDT, and EBSC tables and everyone else gets to enjoy having the bitmaps live inside the font, so we don't need to do crazy CSS sprite rendering.
I'm working with some really great designers. In translating their design, they are asking me why sometimes we don't render non-system fonts exactly as depicted in their designs. A very recent example can be shown in the image attached to this question (ignore red annotations):
I'm using fonts from fonts.com via a javascript include, which allows me to utilize new font-family in my css. I want to draw your attention to two things:
a) On the left, notice the description text "In an effort to ..." is much bolder than "Lorem ipsum ...". Font is "Droid Serif W01 Italic".
b) On the right, notice "MEET ONE" is much bolder than "COMMERZBANK". The font family is "UniversLTW01-57Condense 723821".
I made sure font-weight:normal. And yet, things still look bold on some computers...and it seems to vary depending on which OS and browser you are on. It seems like the only way I can modify the weight of these fonts in an aesthetically pleasing way is by choosing another variation of the font family like the oblique or condensed version (if they exist). But often times, I still can't get the weight to render properly on all the different OS and browser combinations.
How do you guys address these issues? Are there techniques I can use to make the fonts render exactly as depicted in designs regardless of the viewers operating system and browser?
From my experience I always find that font-rendering on the web is nowhere near as good as it is in Photoshop or other design tools. This usually leads to problems like this.
In Photoshop, a designer can use "extra" settings like: "Sharp", "Crisp", "Smooth" and "Strong". All of these variants make the font rendering much nicer. These attributes are not available to us as developers though.
It all comes down to the anti-aliasing of the fonts which all browsers implement in different ways. It is impossible to get fonts to render in the same way across all browsers. This is a reason to use only fonts which are specifically created for the web since they are designed to have good anti-aliasing on screens in the most common sizes.
There are however, some tricks you can try. I have little to no experience with them but hopefully my background answer and these links will give you inspiration in where to find more information about this complex issue.
To me, the left image looks like a classic anti-alias problem. The right picture, I'm not so sure. It almost looks like another font and the size should be big enough for it to render properly.
Check these links out if you wish to read more, hopefully they can be helpful:
Does CSS support text anti-aliasing such as "crisp, sharp etc" yet?
How to do font antialiasing in web page?
Webfont Smoothing and Antialiasing in Firefox and Opera
http://blog.typekit.com/2010/10/21/type-rendering-web-browsers/
"The #font-face CSS at-rule allows authors to specify online fonts to display text on their web pages. By allowing authors to provide their own fonts, #font-face eliminates the need to depend on the limited number of fonts users have installed on their computers. The #font-face at-rule may be used not only at the top level of a CSS, but also inside any CSS conditional-group at-rule." -MDN
#font-face {
[font-family: <family-name>;]?
[src: [ <uri> [format(<string>#)]? | <font-face-name> ]#;]?
[unicode-range: <urange>#;]?
[font-variant: <font-variant>;]?
[font-feature-settings: normal|<feature-tag-value>#;]?
[font-stretch: <font-stretch>;]?
[font-weight: <weight>];
[font-style: <style>];
}
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/#font-face
Its not a perfect solution, but it may get you closer to where you want to be.
We face the same problems you raised and I won't duplicate the good information that's already been covered here. Anti aliasing and CSS are just a part of the picture. So I wanted to touch upon how the typeface foundries and licensing can figure into things.
On the PC side, the reality of webfont services like fonts.com and Typekit usually means results that are noticebly worse. That's regardless of browser.
When you're using a webfonts service you're at the mercy of how that service handles font embedding.
However, if you're using a font that's optimized for web usage and it's available for purchase where you can directly control the embedding of the font files yourself, this article has an good tip to improve rendering on Chrome for Windows.
Examples of foundries that sell (or Google Webfonts at no-cost) fonts for direct embedding are FontSpring, MyFonts, Commercial Type, etc.
Hoefler Type just debuted their own font service that renders beautifully on the PC. It's similar to fonts.com and Typekit in the sense you don't host or embed fonts directly. They've went to an unprecedented level to address all the common issues with webfonts. They adjusted the scale of their font weights and customized their deployment for individual browsers. The limitation is, like many other foundries, as of now you can only buy their typefaces.
Because of these complications we'll usually consider the options for web usage of individual typefaces early on in a project.
From personal experience and high-level research I found that you can come close to achieving a pleasant result using either sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) or pure javascript alternatives like Typeface (http://typeface.neocracy.org:81/) and Cufon (http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/). I have been using Cufon for a while and I find it the easiest and most effective way to get close to the results you are looking for at the moment. Hope that helps if you still havent come across those solutions yet.
For some reason, the spaces between words on a font that I am using disappeared. See:
http://www.fantasynews.com/
I'm using Twitter Bootstrap slightly modified to use Google Web fonts. The font in question is Oswald served up by Google web fonts:
http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Oswald
And the spacing appears normal for me there.
I'm no CSS guru, but I have touched nothing in my code that should alter the way spaces are displayed. I don't know of anything that should target spaces in particular. I feel like this is some dumb mistake that I'm overlooking but I'm clueless. If I view the source, the spaces are clearly there as well as the spaces clearly being there when I inspect the element, in case some bit of javascript was playing a trick.
I am using the latest version of Chrome, although this also appears in Firefox.
I should say that the spacing problem appears specifically for the title in the boxes under latest player news
I forced it by adding word-spacing: 0.25em to my CSS, but I'm not yet 100% sure that fixed it in every browser. It's unfortunate that Google doesn't have an obvious way to link to a particular version of a font so you could be confident it won't change from under you.
Removing font-weight: normal; fixes the spacing (there are 2 instances being applied to it, Inspect Element and you will see them)
EDIT: This is a bad font, you should choose another one! It looks fine bold, but the normal version is awful.
Same problem here, i applied another font to the online website and pray for a solution :(
It may be a wrong encoded file on google's servers. Nobody's safe from minor issue like these, even the guy who encode typos in the webfont service.
I usually use Firefox(newest) for Ubuntu 12.10. Everything looks fine there. In Chrome however, your fonts are most definitely squished. I personally would choose a different font that renders more consistently. If you want to learn more check out Mozilla's MDC Kerning page to get started.
The main way that I use kerning is with the letter-spacing property.
h2 {
letter-spacing: -0.1em;
}
To say that this addresses "kerning" would be false. This actually affects "tracking". The only difference between the two is that kerning is the relationship between two character and tracking relates to a block of text.
I've been wondering myself why on windows my font looks smaller, and much crappier than on OSX.
Screenshot Mac VS Windows : http://screencast.com/t/UUxqLRhM
Is that because i used "em" on some rules instead of "px" ?
Thanks.
(This is from a comment, but I'll post as an answer.)
This is nothing on your end, and the culprit is different font rendering engines. Mac OS X tries to render fonts exactly as they were designed, whereas Windows tries to alter them slightly to make them more readable. The problem is, with certain fonts and sizes, it actually makes them look worse. (This article is a good read on the subject.)
If you make the font bigger, it will probably make it look better on Windows. I would venture to say that if you removed the bold font-weight, it would also look cleaner. You could also try a different font.
Overall though, all you can do is just play with different settings and see what looks good and what doesn't; the actual rendering is out of your control.
Different browsers do have different standard font-sizes. Maybo other font-types and the different way to show fonts of the OS.
100% same look is... not possible
The way MAC and PC handle fonts is different, but that is not what is happening here. You have set a font that is not web-safe, "MyHelveticaBold", and the font windows is using is clearly not the same as the one on your Mac. If you don't want to use a web-safe font then you should use open source web fonts that you can serve to the user upon visiting.
There are some CSS properties that can adjust how a font is rendered such as -webkit-font-smoothing. Read more here: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/01/26/css-properties-that-affect-type-rendering/
I'm trying to get #font-face looking perfect in IE, but am short of a solution.
I've checked out this:
http://allcreatives.net/2009/12/05/smoother-font-face-embedding-in-ie-7-8/
which didn't work on my Windows7 IE.
Anyone has a better solution?
I've sort of come to a conclusion that I feel confortable with.
For text that absolutely need to be perfect across browsers with the anti-aliasing, I would use Cufon/JavaScript solution. #font-face just doesn't compare in terms of rendering across browsers.
For text that does not need that kind of perfection and were using webfont Arial/Verdana etc. to begin with, I would sacrifice extra download of the font to get a nicer font right across the site.
So the answer to the question is no... it is not possible to force the browser in being able/unable to do anti-aliasing by front-end CSS methods.