
Awesome-Fontstacks: free web fonts with failsafes to back them up - ck2
http://awesome-fontstacks.com/
======
bretthopper
Pretty useful. Just keep in that mind that loading up 4+ fonts via @font-face
could easily 500kb more load to the initial request.

Also, this service would be a lot better if it managed to package + download
the font kits for you.

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halfbyte
Thanks for the flowers (I'm one of the creators of this little project).
Regarding the packaging/download: We'd love to do that but it takes a lot of
work technically (and currently this is more of a hobby project) and a lot of
work regarding the licensing. Although currently all fonts we have should be
free for web use, most of them would probably require additional licensing if
we would repackage them. We'd love to do cooperations with services like
fontsquirrel (most of our fonts are taken from their site and their excellent
webfont packager), but that's future talk.

As a closing remark: It was (and still is) a lot of fun to see so many people
care for something we built mostly in 48 hours during the railsrumble 2010. We
had some additional iterations after that, but the core still is rumble
material.

~~~
mono
I shouted out a long "hurray" when I realized what you had done. Is there
something I miss, or why all the comments are so cautious? What's wrong with
webfonts and the packages you create?

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psadauskas
I was tinkering with @font-face in a project website I was working on. It's
pretty cool, but unfortunately Firefox renders the text using the fallback
font until the font specified via @font-face has loaded, resulting in some
ugly snapping around as the various fonts are loaded.

I hear its fixed in Firefox 4.0, though, so I think I'm going to hold off on
@font-face until its out of beta.

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retlehs
That's called FOUT (flash of unstyled text)

<http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/> describes two
different methods you can use to fight it -- I prefer the first where you hide
content till load (or 3 seconds) in FF 3.5+

Last time I tested the FF4 betas the FOUT was still present.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Useless factoid: "fout" means "error" in Dutch. Seems appropiate.

The term 'FOUT' is actually a nod to a ten year old bug named 'Flash of
Unstyled Content' (FOUC). It occurred in early versions of Internet Explorer.
One would first see unstyled content while the CSS was still loading.
<http://bluerobot.com/web/css/fouc.asp/>

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tjpick
"… or browse our library!"

I'd love to. Please make that text a link.

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alecco
You can try fonts on your browser with:

<http://flippingtypical.com/>

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pbhjpbhj
I don't see permissions or license mentioned anywhere for the fonts they're
using - is the copyright situation handled here?

Museo Slab on myfonts.com is $20 for 100k views per month for example.

~~~
halfbyte
Our source is this, so I guess the answer is yes:

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Museo-Slab>

Generally we encourage people to notify us if font licenses change. Which they
sometimes do. Which is a shame.

The whole font licensing business is crap, I can agree to that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
<http://www.fontspring.com/fonts/exljbris/museo-slab> which is the link from
fontsquirrel gives an alternate pricing of $16 fixed + $8.50 for unlimited
websites @font-face. Font-squirrel itself is free (hence their banner) and
they link to other fonts that are free for commercial use but their link in
this case (and others) shows a clear price and license terms.

Considerably better rates than myfonts.com but still not free-gratis nor free-
libre.

Their license is here: <http://www.fontspring.com/fontface>. You are required
to use an alternate rendering of the font with all open-type parts removed
that has been subset to the usage required on the site. This makes it quite
easy for them to check if you're infringing they just download the font from
your site and make sure it meets the license requirements, if not then they
can sue you with impunity.

They can probably argue that if the domain holder on whois isn't the licensee
then you're also infringing (see license term 6).

In short I don't think the copyright holder for Museo Slab offers their
font/typeface for free and suspect anywhere that is offering it or using it is
infringing copyright.

I chose Museo Slab as an exemplar, this is probably also true of the other
fonts on that site.

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candeira
Thanks for a great tool for designers and free-software people (and their
nonzero overlap).

One gripe, though: I wish I could decide by myself which font is suitable for
a given purpose. Maybe this should be an option, so you offer only "suitable
text fonts", but also give a link to toggle the "all fonts" browser.

In any case, sterling job. I hae learnt a lot about web typography by reading
your constructed CSS, and your site is already very useful. Thanks!

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thristian
There are some seriously great fonts in that collection; I'd like to use some
of them offline, but I can't seem to (easily) find a reference to their
original sources or download links (I guess not all of them are licensed for
non-web-font use, but I'm sure some of them are).

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patrickod
Will definitely have to give this a shot seeing as "little" things like this
can really make a product look much nicer

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rix0r
Could you elaborate a little on how matching fonts are chosen? I see delta-VAR
and delta-RLW but what do these mean?

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JJMalina
There are 396 font bundles on this site, but no way to search through them.
Ugh :(

~~~
mono
It would be nice, to have a list of all fonts longer than 5 incrementals. As
the bundles are more or less random, I don't think that searching is more
important than browsing.

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Charuru
I would love font-face a lot more if it didn't look terrible on windows. Has
anyone figured out the fix for that yet?

~~~
thomaspaine
As long as font smoothing is enabled, which I believe vista and 7 do by
default now, most of the Typekit fonts look ok. I wrote up a blog post not too
long ago about dealing with users that don't support font smoothing:

[http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-
standa...](http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-standard-fon)

~~~
Silhouette
Thank you: that's a genuinely useful post, given that Windows market share is
split roughly 50/50 between XP and Vista/7 today.

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derleth
In his examples, is there any difference between Coolvecta and Museo Sans? If
there is, I can't see any.

