It seems as though the use of custom fonts on webpages is becoming increasingly common. With services like TypeKit, there is a also an increasing selection of high-quality fonts to work with.
I'm wondering: Has anyone started building sites that use #font-face fonts exclusively? (Can I finally get rid of Verdana / arial and swap in Myriad?) Or is it still too soon?
Thnx,
I just recently built a website for a client that uses custom fonts (I can't show you because it's not public yet). There is really no reason not to, honestly. #font-face degrades gracefully for browsers/devices that don't support it, and there are very few real downsides to it.
However, the problem with #font-face is that you can't just slap any font onto your website. To build on your example, you would not be able to use Myriad Pro with #font-face because its license does not allow it. Fonts have to specifically allow direct linking in their licenses in order for you to be able to use them on your website. So it isn't as simple as picking any font and using it.
There are still some good free fonts out there, though--check out Font Squirrel and the Google Font API. If you'd specifically like to use a commercial font such as Myriad Pro on your website, you can use another tool such as sIFR.
Related
A web design company design website for me. However, it largely uses Google font Montserrat and Lato, which lead to totally 40 font files(about 1.4MB) to be loaded when users open my website. And based on GTMatrix, 82% data transfer and 56.1% requests are for font files, which slow down my website greatly.
Therefore, I want to find some web safe fonts to replace Montserrat and Lato, so that:
The replacement fonts should look similar to the original fonts.
The replacement fonts should be available in most of the visitors' systems.
It is better to use a font stack so that there will be fallback fonts if these new fonts are not available on the visitors' systems.
In this way, the browser does not need to load additional fonts when user visit my website.
So, firstly, I try to find fonts similar to Montserrat and Lato, I use the following website:
http://www.identifont.com/
It does bring out 30 fonts similar to Montserrat. I call it set A.
Based in the following references, there are no standard list of web safe fonts:
Web Safe fonts - What exactly does that mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography#Web-safe_fonts
What I use is a list at https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp, this list seems looks fine. I call it set B.
Now I try to find a font in both set A and B, with Excel. I can find nothing.
So my question is:
Is there a better way to find web safe font alternative to a given font?
Since there are no font appear in both set A and B, I plan to use my eye to check the similar fonts manually, I wonder if there is an easier way to do that?
The list of "web safe" fonts is really small and none look like Montserrat or Lato.
I'd advise you to stick with the fonts your designer picked. You don't have to load all weights (maybe only regular?) and you can host them yourself and use font-display: swap; so the impact on load time is minimized. If that still isn't acceptable you'd have to pick something like Arial or Verdana for a sans-serif that works on both Mac & Windows.
You probably don't need to change the fonts entirely, but you should only be loading the font styles and weights you are using on your website rather than loading all weights and styles. For example, if you are only using 400 and 700 weights in Lato, untick all of the other weights in Google Fonts.
You could also look at font loaders to help with those initial load times, for example: https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader
During development, and until clients have signed off on fonts, I use the external embed links Google Fonts provides. This combined with a SASS variable for the font face declaration in CSS makes it really easy to change fonts project wide if necessary.
As part of the final process for putting a site live once everything has been approved, I will investigate those external embeds and download the actual .woff2 files (plus related CSS) and add them to my own site files. This reduces the site's reliance on external links and makes the whole project more self contained.
I've just checked the project I'm currently working on (which uses three fonts in a variety of weights). All of the font files combined only add up to ~160k - nowhere near your quoted 1.4mb. At this size, and given modern network speeds and browser caching, I see no issue using web fonts.
My advice would be to optimise how your site pulls in the fonts you want to use, rather than looking for system based alternatives. If you are not comfortable doing the optimisation work yourself, I would get back in touch with the developers and ask them to fix the issue.
What font does google translate use and can you use it in an ebook for kindle?
Google translate
It's Roboto, and yes, you can use it (it's available under Apache License 2.0).
You can find it on Google Fonts as well as the license information.
Finding fonts for yourself
On webpages, it's quite easy to find which font is in use. Just right-click the element you want to know, Inspect Element, and check the cascading stylesheet. You'll probably see a font-family property and that's it.
A web site I'm developing needs two custom font families using. There are close matches to these fonts on Google Fonts, but they aren't exact matches.
I have the ttf files for the two fonts, so can create them easily enough as my own custom web fonts, but I am wondering if using my own custom web fonts (ie, rather than Google Fonts) may have an adverse affect on SEO - as there is far less chance a browser would have my custom fonts cached, which would increase the average page load time.
Although my concern seems valid, I'm wondering if it is significant enough to actually be taken into account by search engines and, therefore, have an adverse effect on the site rankings?
Yes, custom fonts affects loading speed, which in offers lower page ranking. Refer below
http://www.webilogy.com/2013/11/tips-uploading-custom-fonts-website/
http://blog.futtta.be/2011/01/07/website-performance-impact-of-web-fonts/
Well if you look at the top 10k sites from Alexa, you can see how many of them use web fonts. It's an overwhelming majority, including not just copy fonts, but icon fonts like FontAwesome, which is THE most popular web font, pretty much, excluding OS fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Georgia. See the data for yourself here:
http://bonfx.com/fonts-of-the-world/
If there were penalties, which translate into lost revenue, we would not see widespread adoption. I would look for performance gains everywhere else to offset any potential slow down from using web fonts, but definitely keep your web fonts.
Short answer is : No well for the more description
A client needs to have Malgun as the font whenever hangul characters are present. I'm trying to find something to use in CSS that is close to it. I was thinking Verdana. Anyone else have a suggestion?
Verdana is also looking closer to Malgun, I think you should try google fonts http://www.google.com/webfonts
There are no "standard web-based fonts", only fonts that are more or less probable to be installed on the computer, where the browser is running. You may try to build a font-stack, that comes close to the one you want, e.g. the Verdana based font stack from this Sitepoint article, and then use font-loading methods like Google Webfonts to load your defined font for browsers that support loading fonts.
Do not try to give each visitor the same experience, but the best experience possible. Tell your customer, that a website is not a application that looks the same everywhere, but more like a TV program, that must be viewable from a black and white TV also, see this video.
Have you thought about using Fontsquirrel #font-face generator ? Also, for hangul, you might be interested in reading this.
In a web app I work with from time to time the issue of text readability has come up. The reason is that it involves passwords which will be read off of the web page or written down. One of my co-workers pointed out the Crystal font as one that is designed to be unambiguous ("l" and "1" aren't confused, "0" and "O", etc), but I'm pretty sure its not useful on the web. I realize that I will probably have to use a fallback strategy, but am looking for advice on what fonts are good for this purpose and specifically those fonts that users may have available. Also, links to resources on the topic would be great as well. Thanks!
Edit: People have suggested monospace as a readable web font. Can anyone provide additional info on possible fonts that users might have that may be better than monospace so that I can chain fonts together to get the best possible result?
A great start is font-family: monospace. These fonts are designed to be unambiguous.
If you're really desperate to get it exactly right, you can render a little image in your chosen font on the server, then send that.
If readability is the most important thing for the password and you are required to have a specific font you can draw the text on an image on the server using your specific font then serve it to the browser.
The generic monospace font will be somewhat good at this, but not perfect. iIl10oO
However, the best solution is to make sure that the passwords do not contain ambiguous characters.
Try this font stack
font-family: "Lucida Console","Courier New",Monaco,"Nimbus Mono L",monospace;
99% of Windows has Lucida Console and courier new
91% of Mac has Courier New
31% of Linux has Nimbus Mono L
http://www.codestyle.org/servlets/FontStack?stack=Lucida%2BConsole%252CCourier%2BNew%252CMonaco%252CNimbus%2BMono%2BL&generic=monospace&x=5&y=8
As you describe it is intended for people at your work, there's possibly a bit more control on which browser they use. If this browser is modern enough, you can consider using #font-face to explicitly use the Crystal font in your interface.
You can read this article by Paul Irish to learn more about implementing #font-face.
Have a look at #font-face browser support to see which browsers support this feature yet.
Can anyone provide additional info on
possible fonts that users might have
that may be better than monospace so
that I can chain fonts together to get
the best possible result?
On Linux, I like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (or its more extensive variant DejaVu Sans Mono), on Windows I think Consolas is great (but only if Cleartype is on). Mac users might be fond of Monaco. You could name them all in your font declaration, before mentioning the fallback option "monospace" (which probably is Courier New on Windows machines).
I distributed serial keys before using Courier New and it was a bad idea. We regularly had calls about people who didn't read the key right.
We fixed the issue by using VerdanaMono, but Verdana is very similar (we wanted the keys to all take the same horizontal space). We also provided a list of possible characters so people could compare. (It looked like this : "The available characters are : ABCD... abcde... 1234...").