Test: Popular professional fonts as webfont

Why testing popular paid fonts?

I wanted to know how fonts that are popular with designers would look like on the web. Can you just convert those fonts to a webfont and put it in your website? I had mixed experiences with free fonts. But hey, they’re free. Maybe the those fonts you paid a lot of money for can do the job.

When designers realize that web browsers can load any font, they will try to push the limits with trying new fonts and web developers will certainly be pressured to convert a Gill Sans or Garamond into a webfont. License or no license. Especially since they are able to create fonts that contain just a subset of the original characters. That makes it unfit for people who hope to get a professional font for free by just downloading the font file from a website.

The test procedure

Please don’t pin me on not having the right Helvetica or Garamond. I’m not familiar with the subtleties between different version and foundries. I converted the selected fonts with Fontsquirrel’s fontface generator. The result is viewed in the following browsers:

• Firefox 3.5.7 or 3.6 RC1 on Windows Vista
• IE8 on Windows Vista
• IE6 on Windows XP
• Safari 3.12 on Mac OS X Leopard. Since I don’t own a Mac I used the service of Browsrcamp.com.

Fontsquirrel generates a preview text in different font sizes. I used that list of predefined font sizes as my check list. So I tested these font sizes:

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

As you see there are enough other font sizes that might work as webfont. This test is not intended to be absolute and complete. I want to see how professional fonts behave as webfonts and what the typical font render problems are in browsers.

Helvetica

Definitely an all-time favorite. Apple computers have a Helvetica installed by default, but Windows does not. The Helvetica that I used for this test renders reasonably. Check out the screenshots for Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari. I also have the screenshots of the italic fonts for Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari. There are enough rendering glitches, though:

Looking in all four browsers, we get this list of usable and unusable font sizes.
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Garamond

Screenshots of Garamond in Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari.

There were lots of Garamonds to choose from. Don’t pin me down on not having the right Garamond of the right vendor. The errors that I encountered here are of more importance than the difference between different Garamonds.

With Garamond we can clearly see the strange font rendering that can happen in Firefox It’s almost as if it tries to add some creative touch to the font and fails. Take a look at the images below. Some characters are very different from the original font design, not? These rendering oddities also occur with the type Fontin Sans, that’s used on this website. It means that I cannot use some font sizes because some characters look weird.

IE8 is even worse, Mostly because of bad kerning, I’d only use this font if the size is 48 pixels or larger. Look at the images below to see what IE8 does with text in large font sizes like 36px and 60px.

Garamond file size

My Garamond font file is very large to be a webfont by the way: 343Kb. That really asks for removing some characters. If I omit support for Greek, Coptic and Cyrillic, I can scale the file size back to 112 Kb. If I choose to only support Basic Latin, Latin-1 Sup, Currency Symbols and Punctuation, I end up with a file size of 82 Kb. Then you’ll have just one font style of the font family. If you want to have text in Italic, you have to double the file size.

Garamond font size

If you want to use a Garamond, you’ll have to use a much larger font size. That’s because the height difference between uppercase and lowercase in a Garamond is larger than the standard Arial. You need a 16px Garamond to get lowercase text that is of equal to that of a 12px Arial. In case of Helvetica it’s 13px by the way.

So we get this list of usable and unusable font sizes:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72:

Dax

Screenshots of Dax in Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari.

Dax is, to my surprise, doing a pretty job as a webfont. Almost no strange kerning in IE8 and almost no creative font interpretation in Firefox. For some reason are font sizes 21 and 24 bad for all characters, but other font sizes are doing well with the exception of a few characters.

So we get this list of usable and unusable font sizes:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Gill Sans

Screenshots of Gill Sans Regular in Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari.
Screenshots of Gill Sans Bold in Firefox, IE8, IE6 and Safari.

Gill Sans Regular looks relatively nice. There are enough font sizes to choose from. Let’s focus on some rendering issues:

Usable and unusable font sizes for Gill Sans Regular:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Usable and unusable font sizes for Gill Sans Bold:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Bodoni

Screenshots of Bodoni Book in Firefox, IE8, IE6.
Screenshots of Bodoni Book Italic in Firefox, IE8, IE6.

Bodoni renders badly. As I expected. The thin lines in serif fonts prove to be troublesome in webfonts. This is mostly due to the anti-aliasing of IE8 that is way too sharp. The italic font style has a even worse legibility.

Usable and unusable font sizes for Bodoni Book:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Usable and unusable font sizes for Bodoni Book Italic:
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 30 36 48 60 72

Conclusion

Phew! that’s a lot of data. So what does it all mean? Well, for starters we now know for sure that you have to check your font in different browsers and eliminate the font sizes that render badly before you start to design. This and other tests seem to show that it’s best to only use simple, sans-serif fonts. That’s because variation in thickness and diagonal lines prove troublesome in webfonts. Especially in IE8 on Vista because it’s very sharp anti-alias. It’s so sharp that the fonts look jagged.

Fonts in Firefox don’t look jagged and look great in very large sizes. The trouble is the ‘creativity’ in the rendering. Characters can be wider, smaller, higher or lower than intended. In some cases it can change the complete look of a font.

The anti-alias in IE6 on Windows XP SP3 is in most cases way to strong. Most black text is printed grey at smaller sizes. But in some cases the vertical lines of characters exactly fit in one pixel, which results in a pure black line in a grey text. Not good.

And Safari? You haven’t seen me talking about Safari. That’s because the font rendering in OSX is all you could wish for. That doesn’t mean I have seen some rendering issues, but they are of a complete other order and are insignificant compared with the troublesome rendering on Windows. Font rendering in the PC version of Safari is by the way just as bad as IE, if not worse.

I recently tried Typekit and seen webfonts on Ascenderfonts. The selected fonts look most of the time way better than you can do yourself. So I guess that webfont services is logical option, from both legally and legibility standpoint.