4 ms·

Comparison: http://brick.im/preview/brick.html http://brick.im/preview/brick.html http://brick.im/preview/google.html http://brick.im/preview/google.html On

Comparison: http://brick.im/preview/brick.html http://brick.im/preview/brick.html http://brick.im/preview/google.html http://brick.im/preview/google.html On firefox on osx, I see: - better kerning (space between L and o in "Lorem") - better definition in some letters (like the l in "elit") - cool stuff like ligatures (f and i in "overfilled") - and swashes (the Q in "Quisque"). Great work! I'm consistently annoyed but how much stuff google fonts are missing and how slow they are to update their fonts to the newest versions. Crimson Text comes to mind.

alfredxing 13y ago
Thanks! Unrelated note: I locked myself out of HN because I had noprocrast turned on...
keeperofdakeys 13y ago
On firefox on linux, I see the opposite. The j's and t's in the title are too low, and there isn't enough space between the f and i. http://imgur.com/a/5FTc8 http://imgur.com/a/5FTc8 (top is brick, sorry for the misalignment).
- alfredxing 13y ago
  The "low" seems to be a Firefox thing; the f and i are supposed to be like that; it's a ligature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature)!
ams6110 13y ago
I don't see any difference whatsoever.
- chengsun 13y ago
  You'll need to allow brick.im if you have NoScript, because NoScript blocks web fonts.
esrauch 13y ago
Out of curiosity, why are ligatures considered good? I commonly notice them in print because it catches my eye and hinders my scanning. Is it just because I am adjusted to digital media that commonly lacks it and the surprise factor is outweighing some other benefit?
- TacticalCoder 13y ago
  In some cases the results of not having ligatures can look terribly bad. For example for fonts where the 'f' ends with what looks like a dot: if you put that kind of 'f' with an 'i' after it, the dot of the 'i' and the end of the preceding 'f' make for a very, very ugly artefact which looks like two dots connected to each others. Not only I find this ugly but also actually distracting. It depends on the font used, the kerning, etc. This kind of uglyness due to the lack of ligature if not as noticeable on digital media, where we typically don't have the 1200+ dpi that print does and where, hence, you tend not to have these kind of 'f' (for example) because fonts have been hinted (or specifically chosen / created) not too have these issues. I hope my explanation makes sense: I'm not a native english speaker but I did write and typeset myself about a dozen books (most with Quark XPress, one with LaTeX)... And they were all using ligatures IIRC (I should check for my LaTeX one: it's been a long time).
- Grue3 13y ago
  I agree, "fi" looks terrible with that ligature. Much harder to read.
- ozh 13y ago
  Exactly. Ligatures may be neat and pretty for titles and covers, they are certainly not convenient for paragraph text.
- Chris_Newton 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, why are ligatures considered good? Ligatures are just single glyphs that represent multiple letters (or their equivalents). So for example the classic ‘fi’ pair is often turned into a ligature as I’ll discuss below, but the ampersand symbol ‘&’ is also a ligature (it originally came from the Latin word et, meaning “and”, although in many fonts today a much more stylised form is used). In languages like English, ligatures are basically useful for two things: decoration (usually in slightly quirky fonts going for a certain stylised look, rather than everyday typesetting) and tidying up clashes between adjacent letters. The ‘fi’ pair is an example of the second type. In classical typefaces designed for printing, the ‘f’ would often have quite a long overhang at the top. That worked fine when the following letter was something low like an ‘a’ or ‘o’; you’d just close up the spacing a little, perhaps allowing the top of the ‘f’ to reach over the next letter a little, and everything looked lovely. Unfortunately, if the following letter was something tall, like an ‘l’ or a dotted letter such as ‘i’ or ‘j’, this left the typesetter an unwelcome choice between moving the letters further apart (creating an awkward space in the lower half) or keeping them close together (creating a dense area or even touching/overlapping symbols in the upper half). Either way, the result tended to be distracting when set at typical body text sizes. So, ligatures like a combined ‘fi’ were adopted as a solution, in that particular case following the spacing and general shape of the original letters but slightly adjusting the top area to avoid the clash. Unfortunately again, at some point the idea that using such ligatures was automatically a good idea caught on, and instead of serving a useful purpose (fixing clashes in fonts where the design of the font created a clash) they became something supposedly desirable for their own sake, one of those examples of typographic snobbery that just won’t die. That means today we see them not only where they are genuinely useful but also where they’ve been forced artificially. For example, you’ll get a sans serif screen font where the regular ‘f’ has a short overhang and would quite happily sit next to a normal ‘i’ or ‘l’ with no problems, and then someone comes along and creates a distorted ‘fi’ ligature for it where the ‘f’ is extended and then clumsily wrapped into the dot over the ‘i’, even though there’s no reason to do that and actually it distorts the shaping and reads worse than the original. The other common mistake is to try and use techniques that work at body text sizes (where the useful kind of ‘fi’ ligature is a minor adjustment that should go unnoticed by a typical reader) and apply them at larger sizes for things like headings or pull quotes (where the adjustment becomes a big, obvious distortion when scaled up). In most cases, text set at large sizes would have been just fine with the original ‘f’ and ‘i’ glyphs and perhaps a touch of extra spacing, but sadly modern digital typography often lacks the hand-finished refinement that the old masters used to produce (at least in my rose-tinted view of history), because it’s just too much extra work to fine-tune everything. And thus we get things like the example here, where perhaps the ligature has been applied at a size a little larger than it really suits, and so you get what looks like an ‘h’ in the middle of the word and to some readers it then becomes the very distraction it was supposed to avoid.
ionelm 13y ago
Is this http://awesomescreenshot.com/00f2i1es53 http://awesomescreenshot.com/00f2i1es53 a bug? The "t" doesn't have same bottomlime. Screenshot was taken on firefox. It's pretty jarring imho.

alfredxing 13y ago

Thanks! Unrelated note: I locked myself out of HN because I had noprocrast turned on...

keeperofdakeys 13y ago

On firefox on linux, I see the opposite. The j's and t's in the title are too low, and there isn't enough space between the f and i. http://imgur.com/a/5FTc8 http://imgur.com/a/5FTc8 (top is brick, sorry for the misalignment).

alfredxing 13y ago
The "low" seems to be a Firefox thing; the f and i are supposed to be like that; it's a ligature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature)!

ams6110 13y ago

I don't see any difference whatsoever.

chengsun 13y ago
You'll need to allow brick.im if you have NoScript, because NoScript blocks web fonts.

esrauch 13y ago

Out of curiosity, why are ligatures considered good? I commonly notice them in print because it catches my eye and hinders my scanning. Is it just because I am adjusted to digital media that commonly lacks it and the surprise factor is outweighing some other benefit?

TacticalCoder 13y ago
In some cases the results of not having ligatures can look terribly bad. For example for fonts where the 'f' ends with what looks like a dot: if you put that kind of 'f' with an 'i' after it, the dot of the 'i' and the end of the preceding 'f' make for a very, very ugly artefact which looks like two dots connected to each others. Not only I find this ugly but also actually distracting. It depends on the font used, the kerning, etc. This kind of uglyness due to the lack of ligature if not as noticeable on digital media, where we typically don't have the 1200+ dpi that print does and where, hence, you tend not to have these kind of 'f' (for example) because fonts have been hinted (or specifically chosen / created) not too have these issues. I hope my explanation makes sense: I'm not a native english speaker but I did write and typeset myself about a dozen books (most with Quark XPress, one with LaTeX)... And they were all using ligatures IIRC (I should check for my LaTeX one: it's been a long time).
Grue3 13y ago
I agree, "fi" looks terrible with that ligature. Much harder to read.
ozh 13y ago
Exactly. Ligatures may be neat and pretty for titles and covers, they are certainly not convenient for paragraph text.
Chris_Newton 13y ago
Out of curiosity, why are ligatures considered good? Ligatures are just single glyphs that represent multiple letters (or their equivalents). So for example the classic ‘fi’ pair is often turned into a ligature as I’ll discuss below, but the ampersand symbol ‘&’ is also a ligature (it originally came from the Latin word et, meaning “and”, although in many fonts today a much more stylised form is used). In languages like English, ligatures are basically useful for two things: decoration (usually in slightly quirky fonts going for a certain stylised look, rather than everyday typesetting) and tidying up clashes between adjacent letters. The ‘fi’ pair is an example of the second type. In classical typefaces designed for printing, the ‘f’ would often have quite a long overhang at the top. That worked fine when the following letter was something low like an ‘a’ or ‘o’; you’d just close up the spacing a little, perhaps allowing the top of the ‘f’ to reach over the next letter a little, and everything looked lovely. Unfortunately, if the following letter was something tall, like an ‘l’ or a dotted letter such as ‘i’ or ‘j’, this left the typesetter an unwelcome choice between moving the letters further apart (creating an awkward space in the lower half) or keeping them close together (creating a dense area or even touching/overlapping symbols in the upper half). Either way, the result tended to be distracting when set at typical body text sizes. So, ligatures like a combined ‘fi’ were adopted as a solution, in that particular case following the spacing and general shape of the original letters but slightly adjusting the top area to avoid the clash. Unfortunately again, at some point the idea that using such ligatures was automatically a good idea caught on, and instead of serving a useful purpose (fixing clashes in fonts where the design of the font created a clash) they became something supposedly desirable for their own sake, one of those examples of typographic snobbery that just won’t die. That means today we see them not only where they are genuinely useful but also where they’ve been forced artificially. For example, you’ll get a sans serif screen font where the regular ‘f’ has a short overhang and would quite happily sit next to a normal ‘i’ or ‘l’ with no problems, and then someone comes along and creates a distorted ‘fi’ ligature for it where the ‘f’ is extended and then clumsily wrapped into the dot over the ‘i’, even though there’s no reason to do that and actually it distorts the shaping and reads worse than the original. The other common mistake is to try and use techniques that work at body text sizes (where the useful kind of ‘fi’ ligature is a minor adjustment that should go unnoticed by a typical reader) and apply them at larger sizes for things like headings or pull quotes (where the adjustment becomes a big, obvious distortion when scaled up). In most cases, text set at large sizes would have been just fine with the original ‘f’ and ‘i’ glyphs and perhaps a touch of extra spacing, but sadly modern digital typography often lacks the hand-finished refinement that the old masters used to produce (at least in my rose-tinted view of history), because it’s just too much extra work to fine-tune everything. And thus we get things like the example here, where perhaps the ligature has been applied at a size a little larger than it really suits, and so you get what looks like an ‘h’ in the middle of the word and to some readers it then becomes the very distraction it was supposed to avoid.

ionelm 13y ago

Is this http://awesomescreenshot.com/00f2i1es53 http://awesomescreenshot.com/00f2i1es53 a bug? The "t" doesn't have same bottomlime. Screenshot was taken on firefox. It's pretty jarring imho.