The Bright Lines

FontFont is now selling web fonts

Wouter Bos — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:54:09 +0000

In case it wasn’t clear in my previous article: FontFont is now selling some of their fonts as web fonts, including FF DIN, FF Meta, FF Dax, and FF Kievit. Complete list of FontFont’s web fonts. FontFont is only selling the font. They won’t host it for you. And you can only download EOT Lite and WOFF from their website. In order to make web fonts work in Safari and Chrome, you’ll have to Typekit. That’s because Safari en Chrome cannot load WOFF, but will accept TTF or OTF. One problem with the web fonts license is that you cannot create a mock-up in Photoshop since you cannot install an EOT or WOFF on your computer.

Web fonts services list

Web fonts services list

Wouter Bos — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:04:05 +0000

Web font services

Typekit
Started in September 2009 by Jeffrey Veen. Offers both free and paid accounts. You can choose between free fonts as well as fonts from well-known foundries.
Kernest
Free web font service. Commercial use permitted.
Ascender fonts
Webshop of the Ascender Corporation which makes and (re)sell fonts. At first the service offered only EOT Lite, but since 2010 they also support TTF and WOFF. They now also have a 30-day trial account.
Type Front
Does not sell web fonts, but hosts them. Offers a limited free account and a 30-day trial account for other (paid) accounts. It’s an initiative of the Australian company Small Park.
Typotheque
Dutch type foundry that offer their web fonts with a free 30-day trial account. You can specify how you want to use the font by choosing for example the target language and font styles. That way the font can be compressed to a very small size. Offers TTF and EOT.

Where to download web fonts

Fontsquirrel
A large list of free fonts, converted for the web. But watch out. The fact that you can download web fonts does not mean that they are all legible or fit for use.
Fontspring
Font reseller that offers many fonts as fit for the web. Their webfont package consists of an EOT and a TTF.
Web FontFont
Just started selling a few of their fonts as web fonts. Their web fonts packages have a EOT Lite and a WOFF version of the file. You do the hosting of the fonts yourself. As an alternative FontFont advises you to take a free TypeKit account in order to host your files.

Useful FileZilla tips

Wouter Bos — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:22:32 +0000

The goal of an FTP program is simple: move files back and fro between two places and that’s that. It’s always nice to have some advanced features, but just be honest: when do you use those features?

Well, there are a few exceptions to the rule of simplicity if you ask me. So here are a few options of FileZilla that make life a bit easier:

Filter Every website project has files that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual website itself like Thumbs.db and *.bak-files. One thing that really add up in file size and upload time are all the source control data like SVN that are spreaded throughout the folder tree. With this button you can actually set what not to download or upload. Left-clicking on the button let you configure the filter while right-clicking will toggle the filter on or off. The filter is also ideal for making sure you don’t accidentally upload important files like web.config or .htaccess.
Synchronization Do you always click on, say, the images folder on the left and right? Well, you’re free to do so, but I’m lazy. So I always toggle this button on if the folder structure is (almost) identical on both sides. It saves me 50% clicking.
Compare I don’t want to rely on automatic comparison too much, but if you have to update just 5 files and you cannot easily find it between the 500+ other files, this can be a time saver. If you toggle this on, the different files on the server and your local folder will be highlighted. You can compare either by time stamp or by file size. Left and right mouse click either configures or toggles.
Sitemanager You do use it, right? It’s easy to just use the Quickconnect option and it has its purpose. But finding the right connection can be a bit hard between all the dead links. That’s because Filezilla remembers all connection attempts.
Another advantage is the fact that there is a lot you can configure with each FTP connection. I always set the standard local folder and remote folder and sometimes I also check the folder synchronization option. That way I don’t have to look for the right path after I logged in.
Drag & drop Something that wasn’t in it when I first used Filezilla. It’s handy to sometimes just throw something on your desktop.
Centralized configuration This is something we are about to try at my work. You can set the path to alternate configuration files of FileZilla. This enables you to set configuration and FTP connections once for everybody. Jonathan Stegall has written an article on how to do that.

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The Bright Lines on Twitter

Wouter Bos — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:55:26 +0000

Hi,

In case you didn’t see that blue bird next to the logo: The Bright Lines is also on Twitter. For me Twitter is a glorified RSS feed most of the time, but if you feel more comfortable with Twitter than following the RSS or visiting the blog: go right ahead: twitter.com/thebrightlines.

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Hack: how to enable :first-child in IE6

Wouter Bos — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:43:14 +0000

UPDATE: The pure Javascript routine is updated. It is now as fast as jQuery.

One of the things I most dearly miss in IE6 is the lack of support for the CSS selector :first-child. Some shortcomings in browsers can be patched with Javascript. And :first-child is one of them for sure. If you use a Javascript library like jQuery or Prototype it’s just one line of Javascript:

If you don’t like Javascript libraries you can use this pure js-code:

var tags = document.getElementsByTagName("*"); var nTags = tags.length;
for (var i=0;i
Now every first child has the class firstChild that can be used in CSS selectors. You'll get something like this:
ul li:first-child,
ul li.firstChild {
    font-weight: bold;
}

The speed
Throwing around classes through the whole HTML tree is not without a price. Certainly not if you keep in mind that Javascript in IE6 is much slower than in Firefox or Safari. So I tested what would happen if the Javascript would run in the homepage of amazon.com, a page with almost a 1000 tags. Here are the results:

Adding firstChild with jQuery:

Amazon.com homepage (1000 tags): +- 215milliseconds
Five times the Amazon.com homepage (5000 tags): +- 742 milliseconds


Adding firstChild with plain Javascript:

Amazon.com homepage (1000 tags): +- 129 milliseconds
Five times the Amazon.com homepage (5000 tags): +- 798 milliseconds



As you can see there is not much performance difference. Especially when you keep in mind that every time I ran my test page I got different results. With a page of 5000 tags it could run as fast as 481 milliseconds or as slow as 931.
Code crafting
The first test I did with the pure Javascript code gave different results because of a inefficient routine. It ran about 1/3 slower in the 1000-tag page and 4 times slower in a 5000-tag page. After consulting a colleague I was able to find a more efficient routine that could match with jQuery.
Conclusion
I think a lag of about 200 milliseconds during a page load with a 1000 tags can be acceptable. Especially since a web page of 1000 tags is already a large website to my standards. Most websites I develop have about 300 tags a page at best. If you want to use this hack, I guess it's best to test the script in the largest pages of the website. The gain isn't that spectacular: just support for :first-child. But on the other side it could really make your life as a web developer just a bit easier.
You might be tempted to patch other shortcomings of IE6 with Javascript. Don't start coding, but consider the IE7.js-script. But I must say up front that I don't have good experiences with it. The script works good in small pages with small CSS files, but you'll experience serious performance issues with medium or large websites.
Putting it in perspective
Chrome 4, by the way needed just 37 milliseconds to run the Javascript in the 5000-tag page. That's 20 times faster then IE6.


Related posts:
Alternative for :nth-of-type() and :nth-child()
For the sloppy clickers
How to overcome the limits of CSS in Internet Explorer 6
Too advanced CSS selectors

Test: Popular professional fonts as webfont

Wouter Bos — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:04:43 +0000

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:

Some chracters are combined in Firefox (Windows Vista) at 11px.

The kerning of the 'e' is off in IE8, Vista at 15px.

Some characters seem to have a cap at font sizes 14, 16 and 18px in IE8 Vista.

Another kerning problem: the top is cut off in IE8 at smaller font sizes.

IE6 on XP SP3 is doing better than IE8 Vista, but vertical lines are over-emphesized at smaller font sizes and the text is very grey.

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.

Firefox PC: the character 'q' in different font sizes appear very different from each other.

Firefox PC at font size 13px: note the odd 'g' and the uneven distribution of space in the 'm'.

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.

IE8: Because of bad aliasing and bad kerning the 'e' even looks bad at a font size of 36px!

IE8 again: Although I think it's more or less acceptable, the capital 'T' definitely needs more anti-aliasing at the top.

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.

Firefox 3.6 PC: FF and IE8 both have trouble with the diagonal line in the 'e'. At various sizes it looks like a staircase.

Firefox 3.6 PC: Both IE8 and FF have trouble font size 21 and 24. Note that the lines do not always have the same thickness.

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:

Another example of the 'creativity' of Firefox. You see some text in font size 16 and 17. Note the 'o' and 'e' on the top line that look like flat ellipsis instead of perfect circles.

IE8 Vista: Font size 14 looks nice. Except the captital 'T', which is too thick.

IE6 on XP SP3 does too much anti-aliasing, so that text in small sizes become almost a grey blur. Using a bold style can really make a difference.

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.

IE8: Even at large sizes the small lines tend to be troublesome. Note the broken lines in the 'o', 'e', 'p' and 's'.

The grey blur of 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.

Webfont pitfalls

Wouter Bos — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:30:28 +0000

Selecting a font

One of the first pitfalls you can fall into when using webfonts is that you find fonts that seems nice but aren’t usable. That could be for a number of reasons:

Huge line heights: Some (free) fonts have lots of space above and below the type. You have to give the text something like line-height: 0.8em to make it look good. But users with Chrome or old browsers will not see your website. Instead they will see lines of text in Arial on top of eachother.
Legibility: Many fonts are only useful as a heading. That’s because font rendering on Windows is far from perfect. Especially at small font sizes. If your font isn’t readable at 11px, think twice if you want it for your body text. Please keep in mind that fonts in IE are even less legible.
Don’t trust Photoshop: Photoshop cannot emulate the bad aliasing that can occur in browsers, so don’t comfort yourself when everything looks fine in Photoshop.
Test in browsers: Pick the fonts you want to use and test it in different browsers. I like the free font-face service of Fontsquirrel because it not only converts the fonts to webfont format, but it also generates an HTML-file with the webfont in different sizes. Just open the page in various browsers and compare. You can check which font sizes have a good legibility. Be sure to check IE and Safari on PC because they are the worst when it comes to font rendering.
Be wary of free fonts: I use free fonts, but you really have to pick the right ones. Some have for example problems with legibility.
Be wary of commercial fonts as well: Users can download your fonts. So if you use a $200 dollar font, you make it freely available. In theory you could make a new font with just a subset of the original. That would make it less desirable to download, but also less usable and it’s still not legal at all.

Conversion options

Fontsquirrel has some options when converting fonts to EOT, the only font type that IE supports.

Hints: Hints help the anti-aliasing engine with it’s work by giving … well, uhm … hints on how to do that. Hints tell what pixel should get which color in order to create the effect of smooth lines. If your font has bad hints or none at all, you could auto generate them when converting. It can make a difference. Hinting is done fully automatic though, so you could expect glitches like having an i without a dot. Those errors occur mostly at small font sizes, so if you use the font in headings it should be fine.
Subsetting: A font can be as small as 20Kb, but also as large as 200Kb. Multiply that number with every font style you want to use like italic and bold. My weblog loads 4 font files of +- 25Kb. For IE the font files are even larger: 4 times 70 Kb. You can limit the file size by removing all the types you won’t use like Arabic or Chinese.

Setting up the font-face right

The right @font-face syntax: Writing the font-face code isn’t hard to do. But what you really need to be sure of is that it works good for all browsers. After I implemented webfonts in this blog, I discovered that Firefox loaded both OTF and EOT files, although it doesn’t even support EOT! Paul Irish has a nice article about the various font-face options and concludes that there is only one good syntax. That’s the one below:
@font-face { font-family: 'Graublau Web'; src: url('GraublauWeb.eot'); src: local('Graublau Web Regular'), local('Graublau Web'), url('GraublauWeb.otf') format('opentype'); }
Cross domain webfonts: I discovered that Firefox is pretty fussy when about the location of fonts. This can save you an hour of frustration.

Of all the errors I made, the biggest one was the idea that you can grab any font, use it in your website and be sure that it renders like you would expect in Photoshop. It just doesn’t. There aren’t much fonts that render well at 11 to 14 pixels. This blog used the font Fontin Sans for all text. Now I scaled it down to just the logo and the major headings. All other text is “just” Tahoma/Geneva.

jQuery 1.4 performance charts

Wouter Bos — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:04:47 +0000

Yesterday jQuery 1.4 was released. They celebrate it with a special website: jquery14.com. There are a lot new features, but what I definitely like is the fact that performance improves with every release. Here below are a few performance charts from that website. Since the performance is broken down by browser you can see clearly that IE is lagging behind when it comes to Javascript performance.

Hack: how to enable :first-child in IE6

Implementing font-face cross domain

Wouter Bos — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:13:59 +0000

I’m still in the middle of a redesign of my personal weblog, but I’m glad I got the font-face working. It was a hard nut to crack. The source of all the trouble was that Firefox would load font files from other domains. Although the domain restriction isn’t making things easier, it is sort of sensible.

Internet Explorer is the only browser that supports EOT, a font format that has digital rights management. That way you can make sure that your $200 font isn’t downloaded and used by everybody on the internet.

But like I said: IE is the only browser that can understand that file type. So Mozilla apparently implemented some sort of protection against font hijackers: It will only accept fonts from domains that specifically allow fonts to be downloaded. In case of Apache you have to add the following code below to the .htaccess file. I found it on Open Font Library.

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

This does not help you prevent people from stealing your font, but it will protect you from web developers who want to add the URL to the font on your domain in their font-face declaration. It’s not really a solution if you ask me. It seems more like a gesture to the creators of fonts.

It appears you could replace the asteriks with the domain of your website, but in my case (http://electricspace.blogspot.com/) did not do the job.

Do you create your design in Photoshop or Notepad?

Wouter Bos — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:22:14 +0000

Recently Meagan Fisher published an article in which she discusses an alternative way to present a web design to a client: Don’t emulate it in Photoshop, but build it in HTML and CSS. There are some advantages to it. A client can see more than just the design. He/she can also see:

Behaviour of the fluid design
Interaction like hovers
How the website looks in different browsers

On top of it, she also mentions some disadvantages of using Photoshop:

It crashes, leaving you with hours of work lost.
Font rendering sucks

Photoshop is still king

Although creating a website directly in HTML has it advantages, I think designing in Photoshop is better in most cases.

Photoshop is faster

Yes, a simple design could well be created directly in HTML. But not all designs are simple. Changing a background color is easy in CSS, but dragging columns around, changing or altering visuals and all kind of other alterations are quicker in Photoshop. Designs can change dramatically before it is finally approved by the client. Those changes are quicker done in Photoshop.

Photoshop is static

Being static isn’t not just a disadvantage. A static design is in fact helpful because it helps you focus on how a website should look like and not be bogged down by browser incompatibilities. This too gives you extra speed in designing.

Photoshop is versatile

Just because CSS can do stuff like round corners and text shadows in some browsers, doesn’t mean it has become a designing tool. Photoshop can do more than just that. When designing in HTML I start to think too much in the constraints that both HTML and CSS have. In Photoshop I have much more design choices. Because of that I’m able to think more out of the box.

Crashes and font rendering

I was suprised that Photoshop crashes are mentioned as a major problem. I consider Photoshop as a very reliable product. The only problem is that saving can take a while, so not everyone saves regularly. If you don’t save regularly you’re asking for trouble. Even with stable products.

The issue with font rendering is indeed a problem, but that’s more an issue for designers. Clients don’t even know it’s an issue. They’ll only notice differences when they’re dramatic like with webfonts. Just compare this weblog between Apple Safari and IE on the PC: it’s hard not to see the difference.

My preference

Since I’m a web developer I ought to be tempted to skip Photoshop and start coding right away. But that’s not the case. I designed my blog twice last year. In both cases I chose to do the basic design in Photoshop. Only when I was happy with that basic design, I started developing and added extra elements on the fly. The current design of my blog could just as easy be built in HTML/CSS from the start, but I’m convinced it’s better to work in Photoshop first.