Comments for greenideas

Comment on Font-face Support Table by Mike McElligott

Mike McElligott — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:48:49 +0000

Hey Matt, great entry. I’ve been killing myself over attempting to add Hebrew characters to AlphaCards, my flashcard app for WebOS. What’s frustrating is that it looks like WebOS actually downloads the font (from the load time for given characters being displayed on-screen), but then doesn’t use it.

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:17:15 +0000

Just wanted to point out that word-spacing and justify with SVG fonts are broken with webkit browsers at the moment. I filed a bug so hopefully it will get fixed (there’s an example on the bug)

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34236

I’d say webkit support for SVG fonts is only half there.

Comment on Font-face Support Table by Matt Henry

Matt Henry — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:14:44 +0000

It's anybody's guess really. Theoretically, we should be there soon given how the percentage of smartphones that use WebKit-based browsers. But as the table shows, being "Webkit-based" doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot, since Android and PalmOS use Webkit browsers but don't support @font-face at all. Mozilla's Fennec (at least the version that ships with Nokia's Maemo OS on the N900) is good but not great. It renders TTF okay, but renders OTF at a smaller size, and doesn't support SVG or WOFF, despite being based on Firefox 3.6. So, like a lot of things in mobile development, if you're willing to bet that most of your users are using iPhones, you can go ahead and use all of the cool new toys. Even if they aren't, as long as you're smart about picking your font stack in such a way that your layout doesn't blow up and things still look pretty okay if your custom font isn't supported, then you can still use @font-face. I need to do more poking at Maemo & Fennec, and when I do I'll update the table.

Comment on Font-face Support Table by Ian Homer

Ian Homer — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:31:23 +0000

Hi — great analysis on this topic, thx. Have you seen any clues as to when font-face support is coming to mobile? We’re itching to get better font control on mobile.

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by Font-face Support Table « greenideas

Font-face Support Table « greenideas — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:27:06 +0000

[…] go ahead and publish it. For an in-depth explanation of how I got these results, check out this post. In a nutshell, it shows that all of the main desktop browsers support some kind of @font-face […]

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by Louis-Rémi Babé

Louis-Rémi Babé — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:13:54 +0000

I’m really glad that custom fonts finally made it to the Open Web. I do, however, agree with the choice made by Mobile Web Browsers implementors, not only for load time AND memory usage, but also for readability.

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by matt

matt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:19:03 +0000

@Paul Irish

Thanks, man!

That’s correct about the font stack degradation. If you add ‘serif’ after your iffy @font-face font, it will fall back to the default serif at the correct size. It’s worth noting that I was only able to get that behavior out of my actual device, and not from the Xcode iPhone Simulator.

As regards the return value from getComputedStyle(), you may have a point. I’ll have to do some more digging into how that works. And in answer to your question, (Desktop) Safari will happily return the font family when it’s an SVG font, although as you point out, that’s not super meaningful.

So yeah, I’ll do some more digging into getComputedStyle() and see if we can’t tease out something more useful. There’s definitely still plenty of work to be done.

@Louis-Rémi Babé

You’re certainly right that sending giant font files over 3G or worse can get you in trouble. Nonetheless, it’s another tool in the toolkit, and shouldn’t be eschewed if used mindfully.

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by Louis-Rémi Babé

Louis-Rémi Babé — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:00:23 +0000

This is a really valuable piece of info.
For performance reasons it’s actually a good thing that Mobile Browsers do not allow for custom fonts.
Nowadays developers have to cope with the fact that their site won’t look exactly the same everywhere, anyway.
The fact that the user or useragent has more control over the presentation than the developer is a feature of the Open Web, not a bug.

Comment on Webfonts and Mobile Devices by Paul Irish

Paul Irish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:03:21 +0000

Awesome research, Matt! This is killer.

If I recall correctly, only Opera will report the actual font from the font-family stack that it used. Everyone else throws back the entire font stack to getComputedStyle()

From what I and Jonathan Snook have seen only the Mobile Safari within iPhone OS 3.1+ supports SVG webfonts. 3.0.1 users are out of luck.

You seem to be implying that if your font-stack is something like:
font-family: “ChunkFive”, serif;
.. and ChunkFive isn’t working, then it’ll use the system serif and the sizing will match what you expect. Correct? That’s a really good gotcha to know.

Curious: what does getComputedStyle() return for font-family when SVG is used? Just empty string? Seems like a bug worth reporting to WebKit.

Again, great stuff, Matt.

Comment on Install Mongrel & Hpricot Under Ubuntu by Simone

Simone — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:10:44 +0000

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