4 ms·

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in so

by ardy42 6y ago

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?). That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. But manual font hinting is super expensive, so web fonts don't do it. If you disable them, I'm sure the system has to fall back to the (higher quality) defaults. Most web fonts are automatically hinted, so they only look acceptable with font smoothing on (at normal font sizes with normal DPIs). If you turn smoothing off, the fonts look super ugly with all kinds of artifacts like weird double-thick lines. I've tried to disable web fonts because I hate font smoothing (to me it's just blurry, not smooth), but the issue I've run into is the fad of using a custom font for icons, so I end up getting lots of unicode tofu for graphics (e.g. https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568 https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568).

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. I'm not too familiar with the details of the icon fonts, but my bet is that most of those characters are in the private use area. I guess it boils down to if an extension can hook into the font-resolution process, to have different resolution policies for different character ranges. I know there are extensions that can block web fonts, but maybe they just prevent the resource from loading at all.
com2kid 6y ago
> That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. I used to work at MS, and a lot of people don't realize exactly how much time, money, and love is put into fonts there. When my team ordered custom fonts, I personally spent a lot of time going over each character pixel by pixel, in combination with many other characters, to make sure everything was perfect. I know other members on my team did the same. It wasn't some sort of mandate, it was just some sort of institutional knowledge, or maybe pride, that Microsoft was paying for custom fonts for our project and we were going to make well sure and good that what we delivered to customers was perfect. I know there is a holy-war between people who like MacOS's font rendering and people who like Microsoft's font rendering, but I hope everyone can respect the amount of pride that both companies put into their work.
- bloopernova 6y ago
  Just want to say that I really appreciate you and people like you. I can spend hours looking over and comparing fonts I use because small problems can really bug me, no pun intended.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    Moving to web development was jarring. Same platform, different browsers, fonts render differently. Different platform, same browser, fonts render differently. Same computer, same browser, laptop monitor vs external, fonts render differently. Same font, same computer, web browser vs local application, fonts render differently. It is madness.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  This is why I still use Word 97 for writing.

by ardy42 6y ago

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.

ardy42 6y ago
> I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. I'm not too familiar with the details of the icon fonts, but my bet is that most of those characters are in the private use area. I guess it boils down to if an extension can hook into the font-resolution process, to have different resolution policies for different character ranges. I know there are extensions that can block web fonts, but maybe they just prevent the resource from loading at all.

com2kid 6y ago

> That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. I used to work at MS, and a lot of people don't realize exactly how much time, money, and love is put into fonts there. When my team ordered custom fonts, I personally spent a lot of time going over each character pixel by pixel, in combination with many other characters, to make sure everything was perfect. I know other members on my team did the same. It wasn't some sort of mandate, it was just some sort of institutional knowledge, or maybe pride, that Microsoft was paying for custom fonts for our project and we were going to make well sure and good that what we delivered to customers was perfect. I know there is a holy-war between people who like MacOS's font rendering and people who like Microsoft's font rendering, but I hope everyone can respect the amount of pride that both companies put into their work.

bloopernova 6y ago
Just want to say that I really appreciate you and people like you. I can spend hours looking over and comparing fonts I use because small problems can really bug me, no pun intended.
- com2kid 6y ago
  Moving to web development was jarring. Same platform, different browsers, fonts render differently. Different platform, same browser, fonts render differently. Same computer, same browser, laptop monitor vs external, fonts render differently. Same font, same computer, web browser vs local application, fonts render differently. It is madness.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
This is why I still use Word 97 for writing.