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When the survey initially came out I was randomly given Computer Modern. The day before, I had painstakingly converted Computer Modern it to a webfont for a fri

When the survey initially came out I was randomly given Computer Modern. The day before, I had painstakingly converted Computer Modern it to a webfont for a friend's blog (http://www.krisjordan.com http://www.krisjordan.com) and I was shocked to see it on nytimes.com. I quickly went over to a different (Windows) machine to try it out because I couldn't believe my eyes. That one was given Georgia, so I mistakenly assumed that Errol Morris was such a type hipster that he included Computer Modern in his type stack if it was installed locally. It was pretty funny to see this today. One thing I will say, is that the Computer Modern webfont they used is a disaster. It had tons of aliasing issues. I wonder how they sourced it since natively it isn't in a normal font format. (Knuth!) That certainly would skew the results.

jrockway 14y ago
normal font format METAFONT predates TrueType by more than a decade.
- robertskmiles 14y ago
  'Normal', not 'old'. The relevant stat for 'normal' is install base, or frequency of use.
tincholio 14y ago
I don't know if you're aware of this, but just in case: http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/ http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/
kragen 14y ago
So if you want to use cmr, cmi, and friends, on your web site, what's the best way to do it? I see that you seem to have put them in a few different formats in /fonts/ and even stuck a base64 version into the stylesheet itself. I'd be delighted to hear more about the pains you had to take and why!
- JoelSutherland 14y ago
  I started with the OTF files here: http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/ http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/ Then I messed around a bunch with the advanced options on the Font Squirrel @font-face generator: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator I don't remember the exact settings I used, but it needed a decent amount of tweaking to end up looking acceptable. The base64 encoding doesn't contribute to anything other than website performance. It saves an additional request in modern browsers. The other linked fonts are for IE/Older browsers.
  - kragen 14y ago
    Cool, thanks! What kind of aesthetic problems did you have? Poor hinting, lousy kerning?

jrockway 14y ago

normal font format METAFONT predates TrueType by more than a decade.

robertskmiles 14y ago
'Normal', not 'old'. The relevant stat for 'normal' is install base, or frequency of use.

tincholio 14y ago

I don't know if you're aware of this, but just in case: http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/ http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/

kragen 14y ago

So if you want to use cmr, cmi, and friends, on your web site, what's the best way to do it? I see that you seem to have put them in a few different formats in /fonts/ and even stuck a base64 version into the stylesheet itself. I'd be delighted to hear more about the pains you had to take and why!

JoelSutherland 14y ago
I started with the OTF files here: http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/ http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/ Then I messed around a bunch with the advanced options on the Font Squirrel @font-face generator: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator I don't remember the exact settings I used, but it needed a decent amount of tweaking to end up looking acceptable. The base64 encoding doesn't contribute to anything other than website performance. It saves an additional request in modern browsers. The other linked fonts are for IE/Older browsers.
- kragen 14y ago
  Cool, thanks! What kind of aesthetic problems did you have? Poor hinting, lousy kerning?