What Makes a Good Web Font

SitePoint writes "We've published an article on the way in which fonts are used on the Web. We found that a large "x-height" (the height of a lowercase 'x' in relation to the total height of the font) makes fonts more readable on a computer screen, as does a wide "punch width" (the width of the hole inside letters such as 'o' and 'b'). Helvetica is a good font to use online. The designer's choice of fonts is usually limited by the user's OS, but techniques such as SIFr (example) are allowing Web designers to provide their own fonts."

Comments

YES... it's highlightable...

[Volanin]

And yes...
It's also searchable AND displayable without FLASH.

This technique just puts a FLASH "movie" over the original text. If you don't have FLASH, you will just see the original text without the "FLASH fonts"... no big deal.

If you search, the browser will find the text BEHIND the FLASH movie. Everything is fine man.

IMO, this is indeed a Good Thing (TM).

Well, that depends.

[KingSkippus]

Well first of all, most browsers do have an option to set fonts and override other page's fonts if that's really what you want to do.

In IE, it's under Tools / Internet Options / Fonts. To make your chosen fonts override fonts set by Web pages, look under Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility, and there's an option labeled, "Ignore font styles specified on Web pages."

In Firefox, it's under Tools / Options / General / Fonts and Colors. The option to force Firefox to override fonts set by the Web is at the bottom, labeled, "Always use my: Fonts"

In Opera, well, you're on your own, because I haven't played with it enough to know. I suspect that it's extremely similar, though.

What you're complaining about seems to be that the Web is increasingly becoming not just about content, but about presentation as well. I know, I know, that's not what it was originally set up for, but it's changed an awful lot over the years. Some sites just don't work right without the ability to say not only what is on a page, but how it's on the page. I'm not talking about not working from a design or coding point of view, I mean from a structural and stylistic point of view.

As for me, I don't mind. I say, let the site designers present the information to me the way they want to. Yes, sometimes it comes out hideous. Personally, I think whoever picked Bitstream Vera Sans for the ImageMagick home page should be shot. (In the leg; I'm not a capital punishment kind of guy...) If a site looks bad enough, I might avoid it site altogether.

But most of the time, when site designers dink around with the formatting and style, it doesn't degrade from the look and usability. Sometimes, it turns out really spiffy.

So unless a site proves that it's not worth looking at, I think giving them the benefit of a doubt and letting them selecting particular named font is perfectly okay.

Besides, who wants a world in which every frickin' web page looks exactly the same? I kind of like that there are so many different styles of presentation out there in addition to the virtually infinite content!

Re:Calibri

[adamjaskie]

This is why you can specify multiple fonts/font families in CSS.

p {font-family: Calibri, Trebuchet, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

It will check for Calibri, and use that if the user has it installed. If not, it will check for Trebuchet, then Helvetica, and finally, if the user has none of those installed, it will fall back to whatever the user has set as the default sans-serif font.

If there is a particular font you like, you can provide it for download (well, if you are ALLOWED to provide it for download, many commercial fonts have to be purchased) on your site, perhaps with a little blurb about how this font is sooooo great you just have to try it. The user can (if she wants) download and install the font, and your site will look the way you intended.

Please Understand sIFR

[SeinJunkie]

For the uninitiated, please read about sIFR before making accusations about its supposed limitations. It is scalable and it viewable with Flash and/or CSS disabled. The whole point is that the HTML can stay completely semantic and indexable, but the font can be customized to the needs of the designers. Far too many of the responses here indicate that the /. community has no clue quite how far modern web professionals are going to keep the HTML user-friendly and standards-compliant, while still making their website pleasurable to view on as many browsers as possible (so they get web traffic from people besides, you know, geeks).

For further reading into the web designer community, poke around sites like the following:

• css/edge
• Glish CSS Layout Techniques
• Position Is Everything
• stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | CSS layouts
• A List Apart
• CSS Discuss

Re:Kerning

[julesh]

Kerning, that is aligning of individual pairs of letters, is one of the basic concepts in typography. Still, a typical KDE/GNOME/whatever editor/browser is pretty likely to have no kerning at all.

Kerning has to be specified in the font you are using in order to work. And doing it well is one of the hardest parts of font design. Perhaps you have badly kerned fonts installed on your system?

I'm currently running KDE 3.2.1, and can definitely see kerning in my fonts; for instance in K3b, the menu item "Add files..." has the first 'd' pulled slightly left of where it would normally sit. However, I wouldn't say the font it's using (called just "sans serif" in the control centre, so I'm not sure what it is exactly) is great. Although switching on "sub-pixel hinting" in the control centre improves it substantially, there are still problems: "sk", "si" and "sh" seem to be too close together, and "ol" seems to be too far apart, but the big ones ("AV" and the like) all kern correctly.

It seems to me, therefore, that it just comes down to using badly designed fonts.