What @font-face has done is shine a light on all the deficiencies and lack of precision in font rendering and text flow and text layout that have always been with us hidden in plain sight.
Fifteen years into the web, I still can’t set a column of body text – hyphenated and justified – and know what it’s pixel container size, line count, and line breaks will be at any Zoom level across browsers and platforms. It’s a crap shoot. (Rich Fink on Zeldmans article)
Webfonts. fantastic, standard-based, super cool! client project for a friend, he is a type designer, so great chance to play around with his fonts and see what we can do in 2010 with webfonts. also my first foray into them.
In the end it seems sad, but i can say, that at the moment, its only mac osx with webkit/safari/chrome & the newest mozilla running smooth. PC? its ok, in IE 8 but not beau.
its the bloody rendering under windows. sucks! A total desaster under windows xp without „cleartype“ on. i don’t know anything what to do here? how to force ppl to „switch“ it on … very frustrating 🙁
a note to myself: use web fonts for headlines and subheads, 20px up, but for the copy use the default ones, like arial, times, etc. for the moment. it seems to be fail-safe for IE and Mozilla on Mac, Unix and Windows (as long as „clear-type“ is on)– a great round-up is this article by Mrs. Zeldman and discussion about the “ cross browser use“ of it, and not „specially designed for your designer audience “ … read the comments!
what is also quite strange it seems there is only one „web app“: fontsquirrls webfont creator out there. Why isn’t it integrated in CS Adobe? Fireworks? Indesign? No standalone application? or am i wrong? at it seems, the type designer must meet special requirements so the rendering is nice, but then i read webkit/safari choose their own kerning/hinting! Postcript should be better then TT for creating the wof and so on …
very confusing. BUT i just made the first steps on this road, so lets see what’s possible in IE9 and everything coming in 2011! are their any special mailing list or groups out there in Germany, who are discussing web-fonts, besides advertising for font shops webfont stuff?
Still lots of questions!