We're using typekit fonts for some of our styles. We've noticed that on some machines, the fonts don't load on our live site, although they do on our dev site. This is only on certain machines, and only when viewing our live site (which is identical code-wise to dev at this point.)
For example, my boss looks at the dev site and the live site in two separate tabs in Chrome on the Mac. The elements using typekit fonts look different on the live site (they're failing over to the default serif font.) On my Mac in Chrome, everything is correct on both versions of the site.
Is there some kind of browser setting somewhere that would cause this? (Given that the fonts being used are barely distinguishable from a default serif font, my solution would be to just eliminate the typekit fonts altogether, but it's not my call to make.)
I'm not sure if this solves your issue, but my issue was that I was loading "Museo Sans", and I needed to load "museo-sans" for the css font-family. The first font-family was loading the font directly from my machine, so it worked on another designers machine who also had the font loaded, but not on most other devices/machines via typekit file.
Hope this clears up one potential scenario.
Related
GitHub font in my Chrome was like this:
And now it is like this:
Is there any way to switch it back?
That might not be possible at the moment, as Steven Popovich explains in this discussion thread (by Gani Georgiev):
We made a decision to force some of the fonts in the app for layout purposes, but maybe we should revisit it.
That was for GitHub mobile, but it might also have a consequence on the GitHub website itself.
This discussion (about the website) speaks about the Noto Sans font, and suggests using a third-party Chrome plugin Stylebot to change locally said font.
Although the same thread includes:
I've just found that you can force a monospace font for the markdown editor that "fixes" the backtick overlap.
You can go to https://github.com/settings/appearance and enable the "Markdown editor font preference" at the bottom of the page:
I'm using the org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser for a plugin and would like to dynamically include a font by adding #font-face css to head by using javascript.
I'm working on Windows, so eclipse will use the IE engine to render html. But: My solution works great on IE9 when running it in the standalone browser (also in chrome, opera, safari), but not when running it in eclipse.
The javascript is successfully executed, but fonts seem not to be loaded. Are there some security settings I should change on the Browser object? I didn't see such a method...
Btw, the font-face urls point to local font files. And #font-face works when defining it initially instead of dynamically loading it with JS.
The challenge:
Provide dynamic web fonts that render acceptably across all major browsers, devices and Operating Systems
The story:
So I had used cufon or sifr in the past and had since abandoned both in favor of #font-face. After using #font-face in production for some time, I made a horrifying discovery. Many fonts (most?) look like crap in Windows XP, regardless of browser. Even in google chrome, XP renders the fonts unacceptably jagged and ugly.
I am aware of why this is happening. After reading many excellent posts on ye olde stack overflow, I understand the issue is NOT of font hinting, but of XP having clear-type set to off be default. So ALL fonts are jagged in XP by default regardless of application.
So... if #font-face works great everywhere BUT XP with clear-type off, and is still superior to cufon what should we be doing?
Possible solutions:
#font-face as default, Cufon with user agent sniffing for windows XP.
(currently using, and very much not loving it)
#font-face alone with yet unknown method of forcing clear-type
Cufon alone :(
Another paradigm all together
Failed solutions:
Adobe Typekit (jagged in XP on their own website!, even though they show a smooth specimen jpeg)
Google Webfonts (same problem with XP)
#font-face alone (same problem with XP)
Cufon so far works everywhere, but just sucks, and offers additional challenges if you are animating anything, or wish to update the text after the fact.
Do you have a solution that works completely cross browser and cross OS? What is the best way to handle this?
I'm pretty sure the web-fonts, which look ugly, are missing some hinting (edit: Nope, even though hinting is still required to make a font look good on windows, the real problem here was the disabled ClearType in XP. However, this answer has a solution anyway).
Unlike font renderers on other operating systems the windows engine relies on hinting information shipped with the font. If the hinting is missing, bad or broken the font will look ugly - simple as that. Luckly there's a way to add some automatically generated hinting to a ttf-font using ttfautohint. After adding the hinting you can generate the different web-font-formats (eof, woff, etc) you need from the enhanced TTF. Additionally you should try to use SVG fonts if font-smoothing is disabled, since they are always rendered with antialiasing.
I've written an article on how to create web-fonts on Pixels|Bytes, which explains how to add hinting to a font and how to use my Font Smoothie script to enable SVG fonts when necessary. Hope this helps :)
PS: I'm aware that linking to my own blog won't be appreciated here, but I think my post describes a good solution to the problem, so I posted it anyway. Please leave a comment if you want me to remove the link and I'll do so.
http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2009/11/29/how-to-detect-font-smoothing-using-javascript/
This is what I have found works so far. This solution detects jagged fonts, so then we can do something like this: #font-face as standard, and Cufon as fallback.
In my case, I found that the answer does not in fact center on enabling Clear Type in WinXP. Whether Clear Type is enabled or disabled, I find that some of my #font-face English fonts (especially BLACK, SANS-SERIF) look bad in IE7 and IE8. It's sometimes more than just being jagged or having bad anti-aliasing. The big problem I see is that the shape of the font itself (some fonts, not all) seems to squish into something quite unattractive. I found an acceptable solution by following the advice of Torben. Font Hinting was all I needed, and again, that solution has nothing to do with Clear Type being enabled. To get the font hinting app up and running, read the instructions here:
https://gist.github.com/davelab6/3783491
(I used the "ttfautohint-0.95.tar.gz" file here): http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/ttfautohint/0.95/
You should also review the documentation, and you need to also install MacPorts (or you will get an error in the Terminal during your build), but since my rep score prevents me from posting more than two URLs, you'll have to Google for that.
Better hinting doesn't mean your #font-face fonts will now look as perfectly smooth and great on IE in WinXP as they do on Macintosh browsers. But I found that the font hinting prevents nasty distortions in the shape of some fonts within IE7 and IE8. To me, that is an acceptable solution.
I can only add that it's rather troublesome to build the ttfautohintGUI on OSX. You have to installed hundreds of MB of software, downloading from multiple locations too, just to build the GUI app. But once done, the app allows you easily to hint your #Font-Face fonts and resolve many WinXP display issues. Just be sure to tick "Windows Compatibility" in the GUI (it's unticked by default). I also unticked the "Add ttfautohintinfo" and "Pre-hinting" options, leaving everything else as their defaults. Click "Browse..." to add your Input File (the font you want to hint), and then copy and paste that path in the Output File, changing the filename to whatever you want it to be. You won't enable the "Run" button unless there is something in both the Input File and Output File fields.
Best wishes.
In building a Tumblr theme I've got an external .css on my server which is very convenient because I can work directly in my editor, save to my server and refresh to see my results.
However, if I need to make changes to the HTML of my theme I've been making the changes in my editor, copying everything over to the "Customize Theme" option in Tumblr, then having to save there. This is really tedious and cumbersome because of the way their editor is laid out (the html covers the entirety of the the preview).
Does anyone have a smoother workflow?
Even if it involves just viewing my .html directly from my server when tweaking, then pasting it in when done. Like some way to inject test content so it's not just the html template tags?
While Tiny Giant Studios is right as far as the Theme Garden is concerned, there's nothing stopping you from externally hosting 'til your heart's content while you're actively developing.
To that end, you might try Tumblr Themr. I haven't actually tried it yet, but it sounds promising enough.
EDIT: Seeing as the original link is not resolving, you may also try their github page
The short answer is an unfortunate no.
The Tumblr system requires that all assets (from CSS files to images) be kept on the tumblr server. Seeing as theme developers (at the moment in any case) do not have direct ftp access to a theme's directory (if that even exists), one cannot work from an editor (e.g. notepadd++) alone...
I'm not sure if they're looking into changing this, but for the time being we're stuck with being copy/paste solutions.
One thing you could, however try is copying over all the HTML markup and then using browser plugins - like stylebot or developer tools for chrome - to write the CSS and once you're done, copying over all the CSS in the head section of your theme.
I have recently found that Tumblr features GitHub integration where you can just push to a repository and it updates the theme on your blog. I have not tried it myself but I probably will here in the next few hours.
Check it out!
EDIT: My mistake this is only for theme creators who plan on submitting their themes to the list of Tumblr themes that can be chosen by users. Someone may still find this useful so I will leave this answer.
When I create an application on my laptop it compiles and renders just fine. If I compile the page and put it on a server to host it, it still renders just fine on multiple computers.
However, if I transfer the code to my desktop and run it on my desktop the size of all the fonts is all messed up. Everything is MUCH bigger. As you can probably guess, this messes up my layout considerably.
On the desktop machine I am using the GWT browswer...
Any ideas on why the same code would render differently on two different machines?
If I compile the code on the desktop and put it on a server it looks like the laptop version (small).
Essentially I have this:
Laptop
Hosted: small
Server: small
Desktop
Hosted: large
Server: small
I have checked this against IE, firefox and safari.
Why does hosted mode look different?
Thanks!
Because you have different default font sizes and/or monitor dpi settings on the two machines?
AIUI the GWT standard styles just sets font size to "small", which will be relative to the default font size set in the browser. Either set the fonts to a measurement in pixels or, better, use a more liquid layout that can cope with a range of font sizes.
The GWT Debug browser uses the native browser on your machine (so IE on Windows, Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux).
It's not a GWT issue, but some fonts look different in different browsers (even at the same size and style). You need to find a font and size that looks nice across all the browsers you want to support, and then set that as a css style for your text.
It is something to do with the Browser you used, the Browser on your desktop may have large font as preference set. Try restore default settings of that browser or try with other browsers.
I'm doing a project in GWT as well and am getting hit by this as well and here's my take....
[rant]
This whole html, css, javascript ball wasnt just randomly dropped...the mtha fcka was dropped from the fckng space station. You'd think with all the self proclaimed brainiacs out there working on this stuff there'd be a solution by now. There's a million frameworks out there that help avoid putting together a big slop but the fact is that spaghetti nightname started long ago and is beyond clean up and it's called html/javascript.
There's no browser standards. Some sites support only IE, and I'll get that box that says "Sorry, you must use IE" and then the neighbors have to hear me curse cause what are you supposed to do if you don't run Windows?
[/rant]