

Font in your face - deepakjois
http://nimbupani.com/blog/font-in-your-face.html
good overview/background around the @font-face debates
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moe
I'm not holding my breath. Looking at the pace of progress in the browser
world I would say it's a safe bet that at least another 5 years will pass
before @font-face becomes a serious option for public sites...

~~~
adw
I'd say six months at most. It does mean browser detection - serve TTF to
Firefox/Webkit/Opera, OTF to IE - but Typekit, Kernest and Typotheque are all
either in the market or in beta with combo javascript/CDN services to handle
serving the fonts.

~~~
moe
Excuse me?

None of the browsers except IE (and safari?) even has a stable version out
that supports @font-face. It's indeed possible that within 6 months all
browsers will support @font-face in their latest release version, but that's
still a far cry from being able to use it in a meaningful way.

If you care enough about typography to consider custom fonts then you're
probably not very keen on having most of your visitors fall back to their
platform default. And that will be the case for, at the very least, another
year, until those browser upgrades have propagated somewhat.

Then there's the whole issue of bugs and browser incompatibilites. Font
rendering is not exactly trivial. And again, if you care about your fonts then
you're probably not very happy when each browser renders them "slightly
differently".

~~~
nimbupani
Safari 4, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5 are all stable releases and they all support
@font-face.

The only issue is how to support fonts from languages other languages as the
font file size will be really big. And this is where the debate on fonts come
in.

~~~
moe
Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 are beta.

~~~
nimbupani
Erm Firefox 3.5 has been released: <http://www.mozilla.com/en-
US/firefox/firefox.html>

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deepakjois
Good overview/background around the @font-face debates.

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TweedHeads
As a web designer here is my stance:

\- I will only use free fonts

\- I will only use patent-unencumbered fonts

\- I will only use less-than-100k fonts

That's my credo.

~~~
dflock
Don't forget that you can setup your webserver to serve font files gzipped,
which often gets ~50% compression on ttf's.

~~~
nimbupani
yep. But for a 2MB font file that still comes to about 1MB which is quite
hefty a load for one page. The main problem is Safari blocks the text from
rendering until the font loads, which I think is not good for usability.

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sielskr
Too long; didn't read.

