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I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probab

by npunt 13y ago

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what settings you have enabled. Small fixes have dropped but the fundamental issue remains. When I first added Google Fonts to my site, I got word from several readers saying text was illegible. Thats when I discovered that tons of other designers had the same issue and it was Chrome's fault (search 'chrome windows fonts' and enjoy). I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. When a company espouses a newfound interest in design [2] [3], but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Don't get me wrong, I love Google Fonts, it's a fantastic service for the design community. And Google has been building a lot of great design tools [4] that help push the web forward. Just.. close the loop on fonts already. [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 [2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign [3] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [4] https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ https://www.google.com/webdesigner/

visarga 13y ago
> When a company espouses a newfound interest in design, but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Same for Google Maps. I live in Romania and we have had high-rez satellite and maps of our country, including street view, but for 7+ years we haven't had GPS locations of individual house numbers. Android being the most popular phone and Google Maps the most popular GPS/maps app in Romania, not to be able to locate a house on a long street makes it almost useless. GMaps simply points to the middle point of the street - if it is miles long, then you might be a long way from your actual destination. Why can't a multi-billion dollar company get their act together and finish their work? Even small GPS companies sell products that can look up houses on the street, but not Google. Could it be that it is too expensive even for them, or that Romania is worthless for them to spend time to finish the job? I raised the issue on reddit, send feedback directly to them and at one time I even met a Google Maps employee and described our frustration with the Romanian Maps to him directly, but nothing gets done. It's like we fell off the Google Map™ into "forgotten land". And it's not a minor issue, it's like the most central thing a GPS does.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Silhouette 13y ago
I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. On a similar note, caution is needed when using Helvetica in a web font stack. On Windows PCs, this could easily select a low quality screen font that was installed with a printer driver in preference to Arial. Designers who work on Apple gear, where specifying Helvetica tends to find a standard system font that renders reasonably well, sometimes don't realize this.
- npunt 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
  - thristian 13y ago
    Yes, because "Helvetica" is listed before "Arial", and some people have a bogus "Helvetica" installed. If you just want a nice, legible sans-serif font, just put "font-family: sans-serif" into your CSS, and you should universally get a pretty good choice.
DigitalSea 13y ago
This. It's worth pointing out that the antialiasing issue only affects Windows PC's. But this is very much a font issue us developers have to hack around. -webkit-font-smoothing and setting the value to antialiased sometimes fixes this issue.
- yen223 13y ago
  The weirdest part is that, Firefox on Windows renders those fonts fine.
  - DigitalSea 13y ago
    Firefox is fine, yeah. Although, sometimes you do get a weird faux-bolding issue in Firefox for some fonts which cannot be fixed except for not using light text on a dark background and some custom fonts.
andypotts 13y ago
The only reason I came onto this article was to post this. Thank-you for saving me some time.

by npunt 13y ago

visarga 13y ago

> When a company espouses a newfound interest in design, but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Same for Google Maps. I live in Romania and we have had high-rez satellite and maps of our country, including street view, but for 7+ years we haven't had GPS locations of individual house numbers. Android being the most popular phone and Google Maps the most popular GPS/maps app in Romania, not to be able to locate a house on a long street makes it almost useless. GMaps simply points to the middle point of the street - if it is miles long, then you might be a long way from your actual destination. Why can't a multi-billion dollar company get their act together and finish their work? Even small GPS companies sell products that can look up houses on the street, but not Google. Could it be that it is too expensive even for them, or that Romania is worthless for them to spend time to finish the job? I raised the issue on reddit, send feedback directly to them and at one time I even met a Google Maps employee and described our frustration with the Romanian Maps to him directly, but nothing gets done. It's like we fell off the Google Map™ into "forgotten land". And it's not a minor issue, it's like the most central thing a GPS does.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Silhouette 13y ago

I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. On a similar note, caution is needed when using Helvetica in a web font stack. On Windows PCs, this could easily select a low quality screen font that was installed with a printer driver in preference to Arial. Designers who work on Apple gear, where specifying Helvetica tends to find a standard system font that renders reasonably well, sometimes don't realize this.

npunt 13y ago
Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
- thristian 13y ago
  Yes, because "Helvetica" is listed before "Arial", and some people have a bogus "Helvetica" installed. If you just want a nice, legible sans-serif font, just put "font-family: sans-serif" into your CSS, and you should universally get a pretty good choice.

DigitalSea 13y ago

This. It's worth pointing out that the antialiasing issue only affects Windows PC's. But this is very much a font issue us developers have to hack around. -webkit-font-smoothing and setting the value to antialiased sometimes fixes this issue.

yen223 13y ago
The weirdest part is that, Firefox on Windows renders those fonts fine.
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  Firefox is fine, yeah. Although, sometimes you do get a weird faux-bolding issue in Firefox for some fonts which cannot be fixed except for not using light text on a dark background and some custom fonts.

andypotts 13y ago

The only reason I came onto this article was to post this. Thank-you for saving me some time.