PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tag webfonts

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.

Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them. It is very useful for web developers who are looking for just the right font/style/color to use in their pages. To use it all you have to do is simply enter the text you would like to preview, modify the various CSS properties until you find a style you like, and then click on the Get CSS Code button to generate all the necassary CSS code to reproduce those styles in your webpage.

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.

However, I prefer not to use font smoothing on my programming fonts. And Consolas looks like crap without ClearType! Consolas appears to lack any kind of hinting for reasonable display at small point sizes. Consolas isn't just optimized for ClearType, it can barely be used without it.

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

Windows font survey results How sure can you be that the font you specify will be present on the end user's machine? The results below are the latest periodic snapshot of the Code Style Windows font survey and should give you greater confidence in selecting a font. Use the article feedback form below if you want to be alerted to future updates.

Georgia & Verdana Typefaces designed for the screen (finally) + Real fonts on the web? Read the very latest, Includes links for downloading free fonts designed to make web-reading easier.