
Google Fonts Redesigned - uptown
https://fonts.google.com/
======
di
If anyone is curious about the sample text:

* "All their equipment and instruments are alive." (Mr. Spaceship, by Philip K. Dick)

* "A red flair silhouetted the jagged edge of a wing." (The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany)

* "I watched the storm, so beautiful yet terrific." (Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley)

* "Almost before we knew it, we had left the ground." (A Trip to Venus, by John Munro)

* "A shining crescent far beneath the flying vessel." (Triplanetary, by E. E. Smith)

* "It was going to be a lonely trip back." (Youth by Isaac Asimov)

* "Mist enveloped the ship three hours out from port." (The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany)

* "My two natures had memory in common." (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

* "Silver mist suffused the deck of the ship." (The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany)

* "The face of the moon was in shadow." (Mr. Spaceship, by Philip K. Dick)

* "She stared through the window at the stars." (The Millionaire's Convenient Bride, by Catherine George) ????

* "The recorded voice scratched in the speaker." (Deathworld, by Harry Harrison)

* "The sky was cloudless and of a deep dark blue." (A Trip to Venus, by John Munro)

* "The spectacle before us was indeed sublime." (A Trip to Venus, by John Munro)

* "Then came the night of the first falling star." (The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells)

* "Waves flung themselves at the blue evening." (The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany)

~~~
mortenjorck
The first one on the list had convinced me this was a very interestingly-
trained Markov chain generator. I need to read more Philip K. Dick.

~~~
nabla9
Who still remembers MegaHal?

[https://megahal.alioth.debian.org/](https://megahal.alioth.debian.org/)

Some of my favorites:

COULD SHAKE MY TINY FIST AND SWEAR I WASN'T WRONG, BUT WHAT'S THE SENSE IN
ARGUING WHEN YOU'RE MUCH TOO BUSY RETURNING TO THE LAVATORY.

AMAZING GRACE, HOW SWEET THE SOUND OF ONE OR MORE NUMBERS REPRESENTED IN
DIGITAL FORM.

SATAN GUIDES US TELEPATHICLY THROUGH RECTAL THERMOMETERS. WHY DO YOU THINK
ABOUT META-REASONING?

~~~
lylejohnson
Looking through the "Classic Quotes" list, it's apparent that MegaHAL was a
big They Might Be Giants fan.

------
ocdtrekkie
"Your browser is not currently supported. Google Fonts works best on Chrome,
Firefox, or Safari."

Google still treating Edge users like trash, I see[0]. Microsoft Edge works
fine for the vast majority of websites, and a block like this telling you to
get a different browser is incredibly painful. If you tell me I need a
different browser, I'm going to find a different company or website to do
business with.

[0]Gmail pesters Edge users weekly to switch to Chrome. Unlike other browsers,
where pressing 'not interested' causes it to go away permanently, it returns
weekly like a bad rash.

~~~
lallysingh
It's fair play after the IE-ification of the web before that.

~~~
WorldMaker
Is it? The complaint at the time was the number of websites that outright
blocked non-IE browsers rather than just letting the non-IE browsers try their
best to render the pages, closing the web. Just because the tables are now
turned it's appropriate for Google to break the open web? It seems evil from
the standpoint of trying to support an open web (the arguments are the same
now as they were back then), and it seems peculiarly childish and immature for
a company as big as Google.

Not to mention if you were going to do it based on standards support and
caniuse.com statistics, it's Safari now that is the one that lags behind.
Shouldn't Google also start blocking Safari now? Isn't that closer to "fair
play"?

~~~
arebop
works on Firefox and Safari as well as Chrome. There's a difference between
the old-school Microsoft efforts to break competitors and current efforts to
support a (popular) subset of browsers.

~~~
WorldMaker
But the point is that with current standards, things that work on Firefox,
Safari, and Chrome _just work_ on Edge. It's extra effort on Google's part to
throw up "not supported" banners and pretend like Edge is the worst scum and
villainy on the planet. It's a terrible marketing effort disguised as
"building a better web" and it's doing a disservice to the open web, modern
standards, and basic common sense "do the right thing".

~~~
cyphar
How is not devoting time to supporting a proprietary browser doing a
disservice to the open web?

~~~
frogpelt
Sounds like parent is saying Google is spending time to deliberately block/not
support Edge.

~~~
cyphar
How much time would they have to spend with support requests if they don't
spend the small amount of time required to tell people to use something else?
I understand your point, but I personally don't care about proprietary
software not working with certain websites -- they chose to make it their
problem alone. It sucks that Google isn't choosing to not support them because
of _that_, it's because they've had bad experiences with old IE
implementations of standards.

~~~
WorldMaker
1) Google generally doesn't answer support requests, they let a random Google
Group handle it for "community support". (Unless you are an Apps customer in
which case you might expect a reply somewhere between a week and a two years
later, and it's still recommended you try the "community support" first.)

2) This isn't a "We won't support you, use at your own risk" banner, this is a
Chrome __ad __. It 's a Chrome ad disguised as a support banner. It's a Chrome
ad that is designed to get ignorant users to install Chrome out of some fear.
This is no better than those "Your computer is unprotected, install this fake
anti-virus to fix your computer" malware ads you see everywhere! Sure, maybe
Chrome isn't malware to you, but it's unneeded confusion to, say, my
grandmother, to have her browser suddenly change because she installed a thing
Google told she had to to stay "supported"...

3) This is a case of "Proprietary" versus "Proprietary" on Windows: Chromium
is open, Chrome is not and especially on Windows has adware and custom
extensions that are fairly opaque and proprietary. On the other side of the
fence: Edge's JS engine (Chakra) is open source and community developed, and
Edge's WebGL renderer just became open source. Edge is already more open and
standards compliant than IE ever was. Blaming Edge for IE's old problems is
like kicking your new puppy for things your recently deceased dog did.

4) Yes, as a web developer, I remember bad experiences with IE's
implementations of standards, but unlike some I also remember some of the good
experiences. I also am aware enough as a web developer to know that IE's "bad"
implementations helped make the standards _better_. Plenty of people can talk
about how IE contributed XHR and AJAX. Another example is that "box-sizing:
border-box" you see littered throughout CSS these days is "Hey, use the modern
version of the classic IE way because it is easier to math." The point of the
"Open Web" is not that "mistakes shouldn't happen and standards should be
implemented in lockstep", it's that anyone can and should implement the
standards and when the implementations don't agree we use that to make the
standards better! Chrome owes a legacy to IE, and "bad experiences in the
past" don't outweigh the benefit to the Open Web today by not interfering with
users that choose to use Edge regardless of whether or not that's simply
because it is Windows' default browser.

------
mortenjorck
This is a gorgeous redesign that really lets the typography shine, as well as
deftly addressing numerous usability issues with the old site. The family size
filter in particular makes finding a usable set of weights much easier, and
the featured section adds a welcome new layer of curation.

Two minor observations:

\- It would be a great addition to the family size slider to be able to filter
for "contains italics." Some font families have a broad set of stroke weights,
but aren't usable for certain content because they lack italics.

\- A nitpick, but "Handwriting" has always seemed a somewhat suboptimal filter
label. Many of the fonts contained therein might be better described as
"script" or "calligraphic", while "handwriting" connotes something more
strictly vernacular.

All said, this is an excellent update that brings the Google Fonts experience
into the realm of subscription services like Typekit.

~~~
michaelmrose
Are you using chrome? It looks pretty dumb in firefox.

It looks like this.

[http://imgur.com/IT7x83h](http://imgur.com/IT7x83h)

~~~
magicalist
Chrome and Firefox look exactly the same to me

edit: from your comment below, maybe you're on Linux? Sounds like you're
seeing the same thing as this subthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903444)

~~~
jimhefferon
That is what I see also. FF on Linux.

------
SEMW
Looks great in Chrome, completely broken in Firefox:
[https://i.imgur.com/XRMgcHp.png](https://i.imgur.com/XRMgcHp.png).

~~~
scotth
Hey SEMW,

Sorry about that. The missing character detection can be a little finicky. Can
I get a browser version / OS?

~~~
jryan49
I have same issue in Chromium 51.0.2704.84, Arch Linux. I don't have google
fonts installed, is that necessary?

~~~
scotth
No, it is not necessary.

We'll take a look.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
God dammit [https://sr.ht/xkFx.png](https://sr.ht/xkFx.png)

Never, ever, ever disable functionailty based on someone's user agent. Just
let it be broken, because spoiler alert: it's probably usable anyway.

~~~
donovan28
I disagree. If the team knows for sure that this will look terrible on less
popular browsers, then it's probably not worth the PR blow of running a faulty
product. This way, 'it works as intended'.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
If you must, put a warning page in place that tells users they proceed at
their own risk. Completely locking them out based on their user agent is a
crappy thing to do.

------
zy1t
This redesign is awesome, but I think it might have killed my side project.

I’ve been working on a site that offers google fonts with better visuals and
search by font feature (x-height, stroke contrast, etc) functionality.

Sunk 30+ hours into it designing + coding up the front end while my friend
works on programmatically tagging the font on the backend.

I want to continue working on my project, but it now feels a lot less
relevant. Any advice, HN?

For the curious, here's a wireframe of the main
screen:[https://www.dropbox.com/s/vzobxm2a2ul9y5l/main%20search.png?...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/vzobxm2a2ul9y5l/main%20search.png?dl=0)

~~~
amelius
You could generalize the tool, so it also works for other fonts?

~~~
zy1t
That's a good idea. I'd have to look into how to get copies of licensed fonts
to analyze. Actually paying for a license would make this project completely
unfeasible.

~~~
criddell
If you get the basic product up and running, I'm guessing the foundries might
give you a license just because you might be able to drive some business to
them. There may even be an affiliate angle that could be worked.

------
chrismorgan
This is nice and all (apart from an astonishing—even for Google—degree of
browser compatibility regression), but what I really want is for the actual
fonts to be updated. Crimson Text, for example, is an outdated version of the
font, which it breaks a little further too. Upstream
([https://github.com/skosch/Crimson](https://github.com/skosch/Crimson)) has
seen substantial improvements, but Google has never updated it, ignoring the
author’s pleas.

~~~
skosch
Hear, hear :)

Same for many others, e.g. Montserrat or many of Vernon Adam's designs. That
being said, I find the redesign wonderful and long overdue. Maybe now they'll
find the time to update their collection.

~~~
CharlesW
Any suggestions on finding the latest, greatest versions of these fonts?

For example, I found what appears to be the home page of Monsterrat
([http://montserrat.zkysky.com.ar/en](http://montserrat.zkysky.com.ar/en)) but
it directs me to Google Fonts. Similarly, I searched for "vernon adams fonts"
and I don't see what looks like a canonical page for them.

~~~
crawlerie
Brick.im[1] hosts free fonts on Fastly's CDN. Fonts are directly converted
from their sources to .woff only; doesn't support other font formats. No
subsetting means the fonts can be very large, especially those with full
OpenType features.

Most of the fonts are of the latest version though. Fonts not included in
Google Fonts, like Linux Libertine/Biolinum, Aileron, and Heuristica are
included.

If you don't mind the performance hit, you can use it.

[1]: [http://brick.im](http://brick.im)

EDIT: As for where you can find the new versions of the fonts, you can browse
through brick.im's Font repository[2] and click on the `SOURCE` files.

The new Montserrat versions are located here:
[https://github.com/JulietaUla/Montserrat/](https://github.com/JulietaUla/Montserrat/)

[2]: [https://github.com/alfredxing/brick/tree/gh-
pages/_fonts](https://github.com/alfredxing/brick/tree/gh-pages/_fonts)

~~~
CharlesW
Many thanks! Brick looks like a great resource, and it's great to have the
latest Montserrat.

------
thedaemon
I kept looking at the fonts to see what changes they made. Then I realized
that the website was redesigned, not the fonts. Perhaps the title should be
changed to reflect this?

~~~
torbit
sounded correct to me. You just misunderstood, undrstandable. "Google Font" is
the name of the product. If the title was "Google's fonts redesigned", then
I'd agree.

------
cickpass_broken
Todd Motto did a bit of an analysis of the client-side, angular performance:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/toddmotto/status/7427897282573557...](https://mobile.twitter.com/toddmotto/status/742789728257355776)

"Google Fonts is doing some amazing work on performance, no ng-repeats -
superfast DOM rendering. "

~~~
jeffjose
Is that Angular 1 or Angular 2?

~~~
DigitalSea
Looks like Angular 1.

------
rakstrooper
Why does Google deliberately ensure that their websites don't work with
Microsoft browsers?

~~~
Sgt_Apone
Yeah, that is pretty obnoxious. Doesn't work with Microsoft Edge or Explorer
11.

------
hanniabu
I'm not sure how I feel about all these different phrases. I think it's easier
to pick out which font I like when all the phrases are the same. The phrase
"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" had been a great one because it
contains every character in the alphabet so you can see how every letter will
look at once.

~~~
toxican
Agreed. Although you can also type in a phrase of your own choosing and click
"Apply to All" and it will.

------
frenchie4111
I still have the same problem I had with the old UI: The only reason I come to
this site to get the copy/paste one liner to put a certain font on my site,
but every time it takes me a few minutes to find it

~~~
stupidcar
1\. Click a font's plus icon

2\. Click on "1 Family Selected"

3\. Copy the embed link from the dialog.

How is that hard?

~~~
pimlottc
Once you know what to do, it's easy, but it's not immediately obvious that you
need to "Select" a font in order to use it (as opposed to, say, clicking
through to its page), or that clicking on the notification would do anything.

~~~
frenchie4111
This was my point. It's just not intuitive, and I only use the site once every
few months, so I have to figure it out again every time.

------
michaelmrose
It looks like mad libs to me with all these little boxes in place of some of
the letters. This appear to be little input boxes. You can grab and resize the
box but it snaps back, you can also type in the box but it is quickly erased.

Super ridiculous.

~~~
JoblessWonder
Mine only happens with the letter "i" or "I"... very weird.

------
semi-extrinsic
Minor criticism: the characters preview is a bit of a mess. Two issues:

1) You're missing important non-ASCII characters which I know are in some of
these fonts (such as Open Sans). These include German and Scandinavian
characters like ü ä ö æ ø å ß (maybe more).

2) The ordering is non-standard and makes it hard to see what is actually
there and not.

------
stuaxo
Why are loads of the letters replaced by empty boxes ? Is this a gameshow
reference?

[http://imgur.com/CY0yv4R](http://imgur.com/CY0yv4R)

~~~
Freak_NL
Getting the same thing in Firefox. Works in Chromium though. Is this site
still in beta?

------
xaduha
Can someone explain to me why Google Fonts doesn't provide proper cache
headers, still?

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29091014/how-do-i-
levera...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29091014/how-do-i-leverage-
browser-caching-for-google-fonts)

Why disallow caching? Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

~~~
putlake
They do provide proper cache headers. They cache the CSS for 1 day. The actual
font files are cached for a lot longer than that.

The reason for shorter cache periods for CSS is that Google are continually
making improvements. The font files are different e.g. for Mac vs Windows
because they are optimized for platforms.

In general you will find that all URLs that are directly called from millions
of websites (e.g. facebook SDK, Google Analytics snippet) have short TTLs.
Makes sense when you think about it -- 3rd parties providing these resources
need a way to stay agile and ship new versions without forcing millions of
websites to upgrade their code.

~~~
xaduha
> They do provide proper cache headers. They cache the CSS for 1 day. The
> actual font files are cached for a lot longer than that.

I don't see it, not with curl at least.

Looks like actual fonts are cached for a year.

But not CSS,

> curl
> [https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans](https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans)
> -i

expires:Tue, 14 Jun 2016 19:02:03 GMT

date:Tue, 14 Jun 2016 19:02:03 GMT

At the very least they should allow to control that with another query
parameter.

~~~
row1an
Expires is a HTTP/1.0 header, Cache-Control is HTTP/1.1 and used by anything
created in the last 10-15 years. Most sites set the Expires header similar to
their Cache-Control max-age, but I guess Google just doesn't care and it
doesn't really matter anyway.

~~~
xaduha
You might be right, but what I see in the browser dev tools is that my page
always gets the CSS from Google Fonts and that does matter to me.

~~~
row1an
It loads from the cache in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Edge for me.

------
teuth
Really dislike the ng-click navigation for opening individual font pages.
Those clickable elements should be anchors, to allow opening the pages in new
tabs.

There doesn't seem to be any usability case for breaking a basic browsing
convention here.

------
ibero
this is an update i didn't know i wanted. so many great little UX improvements
to my workflow.

an interesting aside, they now have the ability to toggle the background (and
font color). the presets are (black on white, white on black) interestingly,
one of the presets is black on yellow. i didn't realize this was such a a
popular of a text/bg combination.

~~~
macandcheese
It's popular for display fonts and large headlines, there's been an influence
of Swedish graphic design into the web lately and that's a common combination.
Pretty effective for titles and headers with bold fonts.

------
thomaspark
Lovely redesign that addresses usability complaints I had with the old
version. In fact I built my own search tool for Google Fonts a few months back
because of these issues:

[http://fontcdn.org](http://fontcdn.org)

Some of my critiques of the old version:

[http://thomaspark.co/2015/08/a-better-way-to-search-
google-f...](http://thomaspark.co/2015/08/a-better-way-to-search-google-
fonts/)

------
whizzkid
I just wondered why it is laggy when I scroll the page down quickly and
inspected the network activity.

6 times scrolling ends up with 210 new requests. really? Is this really needed
or can't it be improved easily with bigger range of pagination size?

------
jeena
I have to wonder, is this some kind of a joke? [https://jeena.net/s/google-
fonts.png](https://jeena.net/s/google-fonts.png)

~~~
ilamparithi
Same issue in Chrome 51, Ubuntu 14.04.

------
franciscop
Isn't it counterintuitive that there are two scroll next to each other for
smaller screens? And also that the one on the right is to scroll the content
on the left, while the one on the left is to scroll the content on the right.

[http://imgur.com/x9BMjmR](http://imgur.com/x9BMjmR)

------
lossolo
Firefox on Ubuntu:

[http://imgur.com/IpauSTs](http://imgur.com/IpauSTs)

------
gotchange
I congratulate the Google Fonts team The redesign job looks gorgeous and
elegant in terms of UI and UX too but can I make a few suggestions if
possible?

1- Can you please add a double view button at the top to toggle between «List»
and «Grid» views for maximum convenience?

2- At the risk of sounding a bit pedantic but some example sentences for the
Arabic fonts don't look perfect.

For example, for the «Amiri» font, it's الظلال أخفت القمر or more naturally
أخفت الظلال القمر and not الظلال أخفى القمر [1]. For «Lateef» and without
going over a lot of MSA grammatical rules, this is the more correct version of
the example sentence انطلق صوتُ مسجّل عبر مكبِّر الصوت المنصوب أعلى الباب. [2]

[1] The shades hid the moon.

[2] A recorded voice went off through a megaphone/speaker mounted above the
door.

------
microcolonel
This is very frustrating; can't middle click to open a specimen in another
window. I really hate this sort of website. They also seem to disable subpixel
antialiasing on some of the transient buttons. I also don't like transient
buttons to begin with.

Overall really not happy with most of this redesign. The specimen page is
probably more informative though.

I get that OS X has bad subpixel rendering which shows painful fringing on
coloured text, but FreeType handles it flawlessly, and I'm pretty sure
ClearType does as well. There's no reason to disable subpixel rendering on
these platforms.

------
ericmo
Very good, but needs a option for resizing. I've tried looking at monospaced
fonts and couldn't see them at a size that a monospaced font would actually be
used (default is huge).

~~~
quantumet
You can select a size for a given font by hovering over it to reveal the size
slider and other options (desktop version at least), and then applying the
size to all.

~~~
noxxten
The font size slider is incredibly annoying. There should at least be a field
to manually input a size as well. Having fonts jump from 8px - 22px with no
space between is useless.

~~~
kps
Doesn't jump for me. I also notice that if you click the slider, left and
right arrow keys change the size by 1px.

------
buro9
I would love if they released the server logic that chose which file to
include.

With http/2 I'd like to host the files so that they are served from the same
origin, I'd also like to cache the CSS longer than a day.

At the moment I hit two domains (and I preconnect) to try and speed this up:

    
    
        <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis">
        <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
    

Then in my CSS I import:

    
    
        @import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600|Merriweather:400,400italic,700italic,700);
    

That URL loads:

1\. More fonts than I need.

2\. Different font files depending on... useragent?

I'd prefer to self-host so that I could user http/2 server push for new
sessions, and so that I could extend the caching.

The same origin via http/2 would accelerate all of the connections, and
removing the need for the additional TLS connection to 2 Google properties
will speed it up too.

These are about my only criticisms of Google fonts, that the little bit to
make it really useful for those who want webfonts and performance is the bit
that's hidden.

------
barefootcoder
The page has an interesting bug with some special characters... it will
initially accept it, showing it in a different font, and then it will change
to an empty box. I tried a few, such as ™ (trademark) or ∞ (infinity) and they
don't show up on the initial overview page, but if you click on the see
specimen link you can type the same characters and see that the font does have
them defined.

------
textmode
fonts.google*.com is similar to the Facebook "Like" button.

Google effort to inject themselves into websites that may have nothing to do
with Google, read by users who may not even use Google.

Users may be far from Google search engine page or any Google controlled
subsidiary Blogger, etc., yet their Google-authored? browser is still
connecting to Google.

These Google font domains are among the many useless and annoying domains I
block.

I remember the days when another large company was pushing "Web fonts". They
asked the user to "install" the fonts; there was no "font server" and
incessant phoning home.

Today that company forces 10GB+ downloads of their "updated" OS on users
without unequivocal consent. The stories of systems crashing in Africa under
the load and network admins puzzling over the effects of massive Windows
Update traffic in Australia have been amusing.

Keep up the great work guys. Those "web fonts" are really amazing!

------
forrestthewoods
These all look really bad on my Win 10 + Chrome machine. It's like the clear
type settings aren't working right? Every font has a very fuzzy/blurry edge.
Really weird. It's almost like it's rendering small and blowing up. Rather
than rendering large and anti-aliasing.

Maybe something is wrong with my PC?

------
stolsvik
Are these free to use? Open and permissive license? Should be the first thing
that was mentioned on the site.

~~~
manigandham
Yes. It's on the about page.

[https://fonts.google.com/about](https://fonts.google.com/about)

> All the fonts in our catalog are free and open source, making beautiful type
> accessible to anyone for any project. This means you can share favorites and
> collaborate easily with friends and colleagues. Google Fonts takes care of
> all the licensing and hosting, ensuring that the latest and greatest version
> of any font is available to everyone.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is kinda funny given this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11906170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11906170)

------
macandcheese
Beautiful redesign! Very cool functionality with the inline editor and
contextually revealed selectors.

...but they prevent you from right-clicking to open fonts in a new tab. I can
already click into a font by regularly clicking, did they need to override
right-click functionality as well?

------
huntleydavis
Very impressive performance loading considering the number of fonts. Curious
if they are just loading an incredibly stripped down version of each font for
the preview and then lazy loading in the full font if you click to edit the
text. Either way thumbs up.

------
Ciantic
There is still two pages for single font, one such as this:

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans)

And now this:

[https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans)

First one always comes up in search results, and is nothing but a link to real
page. What gives? This is terrible user experience, if I search for Google
fonts, there shouldn't be multiple pages for same font.

------
makecheck
I’m not sure why but interfaces that consist only of red and black text look
very unpleasant to me. I felt the same way when Apple started using red and
black for things like iOS calendar highlights.

I suspect the reason is that they are both strong colors that compete for
attention: black-on-white is high contrast and red is a color that generally
“jumps out” from the page due to the eye’s perception of red. To keep the
colors from competing, one of the text colors should be softer (and if they
must have “red”, they should soften it to something that is closer to pastel
or pink).

------
chmike
What is wrong with this page ? It looks awful with firefox 47.0 on Ubuntu !
[screen capture]([http://imgur.com/hqc6jp2](http://imgur.com/hqc6jp2))

~~~
chmike
Problem disappeared after restarting firefox. You may safely ignore the
reported problem.

------
tacone
Still they don't offer any font+css download opportunity in the way that font
squirrel does. You have to do it by hand or be stuck with their CDN. How bad.

~~~
magicalist
It's smaller than the big embed info screen, but there's a download button
that gives you a zip of your selected fonts in the top right of the "selected
fonts" dialog.

~~~
tacone
Does it give you all the relevant formats (woff/ttf/etc) and the css? If not
it's just unuseful.

------
keyle
It's definitely an upgrade compared to the old version, but the fact that it
needs a "Try typing directly into the... " hint shows the shortcoming of their
UX. I didn't know what it meant, took me a few tries. I think it could be
better. The hover of the fields should be more obvious that it's editable at
least.

------
adams_at
Long overdue and very nice! I would like to filter by OpenType features,
though (e.g., serif font with oldstyle figures).

------
legulere
The sliders on the right side should also work (and activate the box left to
it) when the box left to it is deactivated.

------
eyeareque
What is in it for google to give these fonts away? Does it help them track
people or learn about sites that use them?

~~~
schoen
The original story I heard was that it encouraged people to stop using images
of text on the web (which used to be a common way to get custom typography in
pages). The images of text are hard to index and search because they would
require OCR and would lose other possible semantic information that might be
present in a textual page. So Google hoped that people would choose to use
these fonts and then represent textual information as text rather than as an
image. It seems to have worked!

~~~
eyeareque
That makes perfect sense. Thanks.

------
twhb
To the Google Fonts dev(s) in this thread: why Angular 1, not 2? Was the
previous version already using Angular 1?

------
dpcan
I've been waiting since 1995 to have the same sort of tool built into Windows
to view my installed fonts.

------
andyfleming
All these updates and still can't select a range for "thickness", "width",
etc.

------
zanerino
I can't select 10 px font sizes with the slider on some fonts like "Space
Mono." I can with others, and then can click the "Apply to all specimens" to
update even the fonts I can't adjust with the slider control.

I'm using Firefox 47.0.

------
smpetrey
A wonderful update. A useful creation that celebrates type. High-fives are in
order.

------
NKCSS
I wish you could filter fonts based on writing style; take the letter a for
instance; there can be so many was to represent the lowercase; to get
complementary fonts; it would be nice to filter on those characteristics.

~~~
tropo
Like this?

1\. I hate the lowercase L ("l") looking partly uppercase. 2\. Dollar signs
need two bars. (single means Mexican peso) 3\. Half way up the at sign ("@")
must have 4 lines, not 3. 4\. The asterisk must be 6-point, with a vertical.
5\. The tilde ("~") must be high. 6\. The pipe ("|") must have a center break.
7\. The zero ("0") must be more narrow/pointy than the O.

------
gregmac
Anyone else having trouble with this? Some characters not showing up. Chrome
51 on Windows 10:
[https://i.imgur.com/TTNQSOA.png](https://i.imgur.com/TTNQSOA.png)

------
STRiDEX
Looks like angular 1 with angular material. Works very smoothly here. Neat.

------
calewis
A "+" icon that has a hover state and an interaction, yet do different things?
Good work. Nice quotes are irrelevant if you can't get the basics of user
experience right.

------
Marazan
As a die hard lover of the eurostile inspired 'monofur' as my programming font
Space Mono looks very, very interesting.

~~~
Marazan
Conclusion: Not as good as monofur

------
jenscow
Wow - I did not realise they had so many fonts!

------
msoad
I thought Google Fonts has Farsi fonts as well.

~~~
scotth
Is this what you're looking for?
[https://fonts.google.com/?subset=arabic](https://fonts.google.com/?subset=arabic)

~~~
DonaldFisk
Farsi has four additional letters: : پ [p], چ [t͡ʃ], ژ [ʒ], and گ [ɡ].

~~~
scotth
I copied those characters into the site, and it looks like they're supported
by all but one family. Give it a shot.

------
huangc10
What's the font used on the page? It reads beautifully (especially in the
"about") and I'd like to use it.

~~~
huangc10
My bad, for anyone wondering the same, I just read the source and it's Roboto
(which google uses a lot so I should thought of that in the first place).

------
Flimm
Being able to select a language for the sample text is very useful. Thanks
Google!

------
avikalpa
Is it just me of the Google fonts page look a lot like the Microsoft Metro
design?

------
neves
Why should anyone buy fonts with so many high quality ones free to use?

------
hellok
\\(o_o)/ Unfortunately, this page doesn't exist.

------
adrianlmm
I tried.

[https://imgur.com/umVjMZ4](https://imgur.com/umVjMZ4)

------
alansmitheebk
Most of these look like shit in chrome.

------
honkhonkpants

      Lazy loading
      while I scroll
      makes Chrome cry.

~~~
dubcanada
Would you much rather it load 500 different web fonts on page load and take 50
years to load?

~~~
stonogo
Pagination.

~~~
netinstructions
I found the non-paginated version to be very responsive and quick. Personally,
I prefer non paginated results as long as they're quick, and some user testing
studies indicate this as well[1]. UX folks seem to prefer not to paginate[2].
Who loves pagination? Usually advertisers.

[1][https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/view-all-in-
search...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-
results.html)

[2][http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/21375/is-there-a-
point...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/21375/is-there-a-point-to-
paginating-articles-online)

Coding horror had an interesting article awhile back about this
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-
pagination/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-pagination/)

~~~
stonogo
Links from half a decade ago are irrelevant here. The claim that pagination
only benefits advertisers is ironic, given we are discussing a Google page.

The point of pagination _in this case_ is to reduce the client-side processing
load and up-front bandwidth consumption to view the page. This isn't a news
article. It's a set of nontrivial binary files being downloaded and rendered
using javascript.

The OP of this thread complained that infinite scrolling plus lazy loading put
his browser under heavy load. The first respondent accused him of wanting
everything loading up front. I merely suggest a middle ground.

