Introducing Google fonts

by **Tarot** on July 31st, 2011, 3:08 pm

Hello Mizaharians,

the site now supports the Google webfonts project. This means you can style your posts with any font on the Google directory (214 as of right now) and have it displayed on any computer, regardless of whether they have the font or not, and with any common browser, including IE. All you have to do is browse their webfont index and take note of the fonts you want to use. Then, it's just a matter of adding the googlefont bbcode. For example, to style text in the "Nothing You Could Do" font, you would use:

Code: Select all: [googlefont=Nothing You Could Do]Your text here[/googlefont]

which produces

Your text here

Now, some of you may know we are also working on our own, as of yet unreleased, webfont collection. This is a different bbcode, and while the Google library is not huge or very extravagant, it's optimized for the web and filled with professional fonts that look good even at small sizes. Hopefully it'll make the site look even better! As usual, let me know if you find any bugs with this.

by **Archon** on July 31st, 2011, 3:33 pm

Shiny! Thanks for the hard work Tarot, I can't wait to start using these!

by **Kendall Saarinen** on July 31st, 2011, 3:56 pm

This is so awesome Tarot! Thank you so much!! You are amazing! *hugs*

by **Irriari** on July 31st, 2011, 4:40 pm

Me either! This is great. Sadly, my posting will get really slow when I decide to totally revamp my cs. XD

by **Tabarnac** on August 1st, 2011, 4:37 am

This is great, GP. Thanks!

I like that they are supposed to look good even at smaller fonts. Would it be possible to raise the font size cap for the previous webfonts, though? There were a lot of good ones that weren't usable because they still aren't quite legible at 200. I, of course, would find the ones that aren't. I'm sure most of them are.

Thanks again!

by **Marlow** on August 1st, 2011, 4:44 am

Nice!

I'm still looking to fill in one CS so I might be able to use those.

by **Tarot** on August 1st, 2011, 8:07 am

Tabby... it's not wise to raise the size cap unless you want to be buried in huge signatures by unsuspecting newbies. There is a trick, though...

Code: Select all: [style=font-size:300%]Try this...[/style]

The .ttf webfonts you're talking about are often not meant for display text size, partly because of their design and partly due to incomplete 'hinting'. In computer typography, hinting is how fonts tell the computer to render them at small sizes, when their elements have pixel or sub-pixel width. Especially on Windows, which tries to align fonts to the pixel grid with relatively little anti-aliasing, hinting is pretty important but a lot of free fonts are not optimized for such use.

Also, I have noticed that webfonts won't work in Firefox if you're using an authenticated proxy. That's a problem with FF that will hopefully be fixed.

by **Tabarnac** on August 2nd, 2011, 12:00 am

Thanks for the schoolin', GP. Carry on.