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.

The Bright Lines » font-face