PUBLIC MARKS with tags typography & webfonts

It’s hard to believe that it has only been three months since we launched Typekit — so much has happened in the webfont world in such a short time. We’ve been inspired recently by beautiful redesigns, increasingly sophisticated browser support, and many more foundries choosing to embrace @font-face.

Georgia and Verdana, Lucida and (to a lesser extent) Arial and Times New Roman have served us well. For fifteen years, these cross-platform default fonts have been faithful stewards of our desire to read, write, design, and publish web pages. Yet we designers have always wanted more. As far back as 1994, we hoped for the day when we could brand our layouts as magazine and poster designers do, by setting our pages in Franklin or Garamond, our headlines in Futura or Rosewood. And since 1998, CSS2 has provided a standard way to embed any typeface, not just the fab five, on a web page.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set: 1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client 2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market 3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases 4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

This article was written by John Daggett. John is a Mozilla contributor and has been working hard with font creators and web developers to improve the state of fonts on the web. This article is a high-level overview of whats different and shows some examples of WOFF in use. A full list of other supporting organizations can be found at the official Mozilla Blog.

The Web Open Font Format (WOFF), a format developed during 2009, is essentially a wrapper that contains sfnt-based fonts (TrueType, OpenType or Open Font Format) that have been compressed using a WOFF encoding tool to enable them to be embedded in a web page.[8]. The format uses zip compression[9], typically resulting in a filesize reduction from ttf of over 40%[10] The format has received the backing of many of the main font foundries[11] and, on October 20th, 2009, Mozilla announced that it would provide support for WOFF in Firefox 3.6.[12] During the October 2009 Typ09 conference, Microsoft were reported as saying that they were 'considering' supporting WOFF in Internet Explorer 9.[13] WOFF is "a strong favourite" for standardization by the W3C Web Fonts Working Group.[14]

Clearleft and OmniTi present Fontdeck, a web service delivering real fonts to your website.

Clearleft and OmniTi present Fontdeck, a web service delivering real fonts to your website.

Because web type renders differently with only subtle CSS adjustments, seeing it exercised in a variety of ways can help web designers typeset—and also help them decide which typefaces to purchase for their projects. Read more at A List Apart.

Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. Here are some of our favorites

veryone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.

Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón, which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set: 1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client 2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market 3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases 4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

Led by Richard Rutter Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction. However it brings with it a host of complications; technical, ethical and aesthetic. This session will explain all.

Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac supports the embedding of “sfnt fonts” (TrueType, OpenType PS, OpenType TT) using the font-face declaration. Technically the fonts are not embedded in the website, but they are simply linked like an image file. Thus the fonts need to be stored on a public server. Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. FDI fonts.info believes in the future of web fonts, so we decided to provide webdesigners with a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings. Graublau Sans Web regular and bold can be downloaded for free from fonts.info and you may embed them in any website you like. If you do, please put a link to fonts.info on your site and mind the End User License Agreement.

L’iPhone Apple est sorti le 29 novembre 2007 en France. Les allumés des caractères n’auront pas raté la comparaison des fontes (merci Daring Fireball) présentes sur iPhone, notamment sur le navigateur Safari iPhone, versus Safari MacOsX. Une autre liste de caractères est disponible ici. L’interface en Helvetica, c’est pas si gênant, même pour les plus anti-caractère par défaut. Même si John D Berry pense le contraire. Le plus étonnant c’est de découvrir que le Lucida Grande n’est pas présent, comme sur MacOs X. De nombreux sites web avaient pris l’habitude de spécifier le Lucida Grande comme fonte par défaut dans leurs CSS, comme le typographe.com, plus sympa que les éternels Verdana-Trebuchet-Arial. Enfin, ces fontes semblent être au format .ttf et pas .dfont, comme sur MacOs X.

Many people spend hours a day looking at text on their desktop, laptop, and handheld computer screens, fueling a demand for the highest possible quality text rendering. There are three primary axes to evaluate text rendering quality: contrast of the glyph renderings, fidelity to the original forms, and evenness of spacing. Until now, font rendering implementors have had to make a difficult tradeoff between these goals. It's straightforward to render glyph shapes and spacing accurately if you can tolerate a loss of contrast, as exhibited by the font rendering in Mac OS X. Similarly, applying font hinting techniques originally developed for bilevel rendering can improve contrast significantly, but at the cost of significant distortion of letterforms. This white paper introduces FontFocus, a new patent-pending technology from Artifex Software, Inc., the people behind the Ghostscript PDL engine. FontFocus, for the first time, renders text both with uncompromising fidelity, and with contrast improvements as good as the best of the font hinting techniques.

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

“Headings, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, illustrations, captions and other intrusions into the text create syncopations and variations against the base rhythm of regularly leaded lines. These variations can and should add life to the page, but the main text should also return after each variation precisely on beat and in phase.”

i’ve been delving in my typo/design books lately, and i learned a concept i didn’t know before the idea of type being “in phase” the idea is that for a column of type, you choose a line-height and if every line locks into that grid, the lines are “in phase”

This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C. If you're new to this site, you can find help on how to use this reference.

The IHT on a resurgence in popularity of the Georgia typeface online - "That is why we felt ready to forsake Verdana's clarity for Georgia's quirky serifs - at least until the next newly fashionable typeface comes along.'

# Cambria is a smaller, more readable version of Georgia. Then again, all serif fonts look alike to me. # Calibri is like a slightly condensed version of Corbel and Candara. # Calibri, Candara, and Corbel are all too small compared to the current set of de facto Windows fonts (such as Georgia at 12pt compared with Calibri at 12pt) to make them impossible to use along with a current Windows font in a browser. For example, using Georgia and Calibri in your browser produces readable serif text but small, unreadable sans-serif text since both fonts must use the same font size.

Last month, I introduced Segoe UI, the new user interface font for Office 12 and Windows Vista. Of course, you spend most of your time in Office not looking at the user interface, but working with documents. Times New Roman has been Word's default font since Word 6.0 introduced support for TrueType fonts. Although there are numerous other options available, most documents today are produced in Times New Roman, Arial, or more recently the Web-friendly choice Verdana.

Microsoft ClearType is an unprecedented innovation in font display technology that dramatically improves font display resolution and marks a genuine breakthrough in screen readability.