
Adobe Edge Web Fonts - ujeezy
http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/
======
dgreensp
Careful, you can't legally serve these fonts with your app, you can only link
to them. Am I the only one who finds this a big deal? It means you can't
control the uptime of your fonts, and it seems like it would complicate
development when you're offline, too.

From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to turn fonts into a
"service" by hyping the hosting aspect. It would be like if jQuery said you
can't serve jquery.js from your web server, you can only link to it, and then
they start offering paid versions of jQuery.

I realize fonts are a commercial product, but my understanding is that Google
Web Fonts really _are_ free to use in your apps, whereas this is a free
_service_. According to the terms, it is illegal to "retransmit" the "Service
Materials".

~~~
Silhouette
I'm not sure I understand where the fonts on that page are coming from. They
don't seem to be the serious Adobe professional fonts, many of which are
available from font-as-a-service providers at a cost. Rather, they seem to be
a lot of familiar things people are already using via Google Web Fonts and
other free sources: Arvo, PT Sans, League Gothic, etc. Some (all?) of these
_are_ available under quite open licences, so I'm not sure what right Adobe
would have to restrict those anyway.

~~~
dholowiski
Chunk is a serious font, we just bought 30 licenses for a variant of it (chunk
five) a few months ago.

~~~
Meai
It's free here: <http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/ChunkFive>

~~~
dholowiski
Shit.

Thanks.

~~~
csomar
A bit curious: 30 variants of Chnuk 5 are not Chunk 5. Where did you buy it
from?

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nostromo
Adobe really needs to drop the corporate marketer talk.

"Adobe Edge Tools & Services: New tools and services for a beautiful, modern
web."

"Edge Web Fonts is conveniently built into Edge Code today and will be
available in Edge Reflow and other Edge Tools & Services soon."

I'm reading all this and I still have no idea what Edge is or why I should
care.

A much more informative link for the HN audience is this:
<http://www.edgefonts.com/>

~~~
loceng
They want to appeal to bosses who will tell the developers to use it..

~~~
cpeterso
Yes. Managers, not developers, are Adobe's customers.

~~~
dholowiski
I'm not a boss but I showed my developer could workers and he couldn't figure
it out.

~~~
lucisferre
What?

~~~
dholowiski
should have read "co-worker" thanks auto correct.

~~~
lucisferre
No problem, I would have suggested a helpful correction but I was completely
lost. On that note, I just though how funny it would be if autocorrect just
had a WTF? when it was completely lost.

------
thaumaturgy
Neat, but I don't understand why Adobe would do this. I already use Adobe
Typekit, and $50/year gives me access to a huge library of fonts at an
unlimited number of websites. For my purposes, I'm tempted to stop paying even
that totally reasonable, meager amount and just use this free offering
instead.

After following most of the links on the page, I can't find any mention of
limits on pageviews or traffic. On the surface of it, that makes their free
offering a little bit better than their paid offering.

~~~
H_L
I feel that this is effectively:

Adobe® Edge Web Fonts: Paid for graciously by the users of Typekit.

------
zalew

        <script src="http://use.edgefonts.net/league-gothic.js"></script>
    

I wonder why they pushed negotiation to the client side instead of doing like
google. you need to send this <http://use.edgefonts.net/league-gothic.js> to
your user instead of this
<http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Code+Pro> in order to serve
your font, and it won't work with js disabled.

~~~
clarkdave
This is similar to how TypeKit serve their fonts. They wrote a blog post
explaining their reasoning: [http://blog.typekit.com/2011/08/11/better-web-
font-loading-w...](http://blog.typekit.com/2011/08/11/better-web-font-loading-
with-javascript/)

~~~
JoshTriplett
That post claims that fonts don't have a fallback mechanism for when a font
fails to load, but fonts have had fallbacks for as long as we've had CSS:

    
    
        font-family: "Obscure Font", "Common Font", sans-serif;

~~~
ricardobeat
I don't know the current state of things, but a failed font download used to
result in blank/transparent text in some browsers, ignoring the fallback font.

------
gokhan
Sad that they don't support international characters (or at least not the full
character set of the language we use here).

Fonts provided by Google are better in character range coverage. Anyway,
thanks Adobe.

~~~
adamkiss
I thought so as well first time, but it seems they do, see 'subset' section
here: <http://www.edgefonts.com/#url-specification>

Also: <http://jsfiddle.net/6zUQu/1/>

It seems that only the example on their site includes 'default' character set.
Note that, though, sadly not all fonts have different than latin-1, or partial
latin-1-ext.

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kibwen
_"In addition, Adobe will be applying its considerable font expertise to
improving and optimizing a number of the open source fonts that are available
in both Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts. The teams from Typekit, Adobe
Type, and Google Web Fonts are working to identify which fonts will benefit
the most from our attention, and how we can best approach improving their
rendering and performance."_

Helping to improve fonts that are not just freely available, but freely
available on services other than your own? It's almost like I'm starting to
feel goodwill towards Adobe. It's rather strange.

~~~
digitalengineer
Back in the day they did fight Fontshop in court to make it possible to embed
fonts (in PDF-files). Today there are still fontdesigners that charge an extra
fee if you use theirfonts in things like Flash. Or just forbid it. Yeah, I'm
looking atyou HouseIndustries...

~~~
Silhouette
I find Adobe remarkably inconsistent. The people behind their most famous
product line, Creative Suite, seem to consistently produce poor quality
software full of awkward limitations and oversights backed by terrible
customer support, whose only redeeming feature is that since they basically
killed off or bought all of the serious competition years ago everyone else's
software is actually worse.

On the other hand, Adobe's typography people seem to be consistently good at
producing high quality work, selling it at reasonable prices, and offering it
on reasonable terms. Consequently, probably 90% of the money I've spent on
serious fonts over the years has gone to Adobe, because they blow away the
the-90s-called-they-want-their-printers-back silliness of certain other well
known foundries, who either haven't noticed that we use fonts more on-screen
than in print these days or who shamelessly advertise one price when the
actual price to buy a useful product is presumably higher (presumably, because
they never seem to tell you how much those extra permissions will actually
cost).

------
systemtrigger
Browse the fonts listed in the select box:
<http://2012.s3.amazonaws.com/edgefonts.html>

~~~
Jare
That page crashes my Chrome tab. Wonder what's the practical limit for number
of custom fonts.

------
jonny_eh
I've never heard of this "Adobe Edge". What's the deal here? I can't tell if
it's a free thing or what.

~~~
pdeuchler
Adobe's closed source fork of <http://brackets.io>

~~~
goldfeld
Actually, Brackets itself started inside Adobe by a group of employees, so
Edge Code is their distribution package as much as Chrome is to Chromium. I
can't see it in a negative light, I think they're getting this right.

~~~
empire29
Adobe is following this "open core" approach on several of its newer
offerings. For Instance adobe

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rlt3
I see a few overlapping fonts (or, at least, overlapping names) from Google
Web Fonts. But most seem new.

Is there going to be a new competition over who has the 'cutting-edge' fonts?

~~~
DASD
Their linked blog mentions a partnership with Google regarding some of the
fonts offered.

[http://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/introducing-adobe-edge-
we...](http://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/introducing-adobe-edge-web-fonts/)

With that said and paranoia of external asset serving/hosting, does anyone
know if these fonts can be self-hosted?

~~~
icoloma
Also, there is an extra DNS round trip by using an external web service. And I
hate seeing JavaScript crawl into my <head> tag - certainly not for a web
font.

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ghostblog
Damn........ they got a font called Lobster Two

This changes everything

~~~
Dystopian
Wait till you see Helvetica Neue S...

~jk

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adhipg
Am I right in thinking that they don't support Web Font Loader? [1]

Considering this is built on top of Typekit — which does support Web Font
Loader — this is surprising.

[1] - <https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader>

------
adobemeh
If Adobe were really interested improving the web typography either Myriad Pro
would be in the free set (it isn't) or they would change the default font in
their creative suites to one of the free fonts (they haven't)

------
znowi
This is frustrating. I've spent 10 minutes on their site, checked out the
links, and still can't figure out how to browse their font collection. Am I
supposed to sign up with this Edge tool to do that? By contrast, see
<http://www.google.com/webfonts>. You land there and start working.

~~~
parkov
I found that equally baffling. I threw together a page that displays the best
(according to Adobe[1]) webfonts of the bunch: <http://jsbin.com/itayep>

[1] <http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/#edgeWebFonts>

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alexchamberlain
Am I right in thinking Adobe bought TypeKit?

~~~
ceejayoz
You're right, but you're about a year late.

<http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/>

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sjtgraham
Still no VAG Rundschrift. I have seen people request it on Typekit for years.
Adobe is the licensor for this font, I have no idea why they haven't listened
and either start offering it as a web font or explain why they won't/can't.

~~~
d503
If you don't mind hosting it yourself it looks like you can buy VAG
Rundschrift as a downloadable web font from MyFonts.com.

<http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/vag-rundschrift/>

------
digitalengineer
Priceless! "Our mission: move the web forward and give web designers and
developers the best tools and services in the world." And then: "Download a
PDF version of this document (PDF, 47 KB)"

~~~
eps
You do know that PDF is an open format, right?

~~~
threedaymonk
Aye, but it's not exactly moving the _web_ forward, is it?

~~~
digitalengineer
My point exactly.

------
lelandbatey
I have a question on how web-fonts actually work.

I thought fonts basically just vector graphics. Since these are just java-
script files, how are they being distributed? How do these work?

~~~
zalew
<http://webfonts.info/browser-support-overview>

google: embed css link, the negotiation which one to download is made server-
side

adobe: embed js link, the negotiation which one to download is made client-
side

~~~
lelandbatey
Ah, I see now. Thanks for clarifying.

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tarr11
Is there a web page to browse all these fonts? That dropdown is tedious to
use.

~~~
yvoschaap2
I created one for that: <http://www.yvoschaap.com/edgefonts/>

Prepare for some resource hogging :)

~~~
demetris
Thank you!

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gadders
And I can't see any of these in IE 8 (using IE8 due to corporate lockdown).

~~~
gadders
My mistake - low system resources on the P.O.S. laptop I'm issued with.

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mnicole
Does this still put an ugly badge on the corner of your page?

------
fuqyoooouu
This is trash. A repackaging of a lot of free OFL type that's already out
there, but new and improved with restricted licensing, JS dependency, and
relying on Adobe.

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drivebyacct2
Too bad this is what hit the top slot. They also announced the release of the
open source code and its monospace variant. I'm using it in elementary OS and
it looks fantastic in Sublime Text and terminal.

~~~
mavelikara
Googling did not help, so can anyone please provide a link to the other
announcement?

~~~
mavelikara
Got it : [http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-
pro....](http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html)

~~~
graue
This is a good font, but to me it's nowhere near as good as Inconsolata-g, the
best fixed-width font I've found.

<http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html>

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dsolomon
It's fonts and a pageful of bitter people who cannot figure them out.

------
tomelders
I no longer trust, nor like Adobe. And I don't think I ever will again. I
genuinely want to see them fail in everything they do and I care not one jot
for the men and women who work there or their families. I root for Pixelmator,
I salute Apple's stance on flash and even wanted Silverlight to give Adobe a
run for it's money.

There is a point to this rant. I have used Adobe products my entire working
life. I loved Adobe and the products they made. But now...? I am what happens
when you treat your users like shit, and everyone else like idiots.

Fortunatly for me, my inflated opinion and militant outlook is made more
tenable when they keep releasing turds like this.

~~~
daeken
Sorry, but no, there was no point to that rant. I'm no Adobe fan either, but
your comment adds no value; it isn't a specific criticism, just being angry.
If you dislike them, just don't use their products and move on.

