Nice Web Type

John Gruber offers a great introduction to a Typophile thread in which folks react to Apple's claim that, "Web Designers Can Post ‘Any Font’ for Use With Safari."

"Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. FDI fonts.info believes in the future of web fonts, so we decided to provide webdesigners with a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings."

Bill Hill, head of Microsoft's Typography group, urges the font industry to address for-web licensing, and makes a case for Microsoft's EOT embedding technology.

"Safari evidently has no trouble rendering [...] but it ignores the font’s metrics and kerns letter pairs. Firefox [...] won’t render [...], however the kerning seems to be respected."

Jon Tan argues that, "we don’t just need standards for layout and object rendering, but also a standard type library that is universally available to all." He also explains how it's a different issue than @font-face.

Jon Tan delves into how core web fonts, "render differently on different operating systems." Includes a rich group of references at the end, too.

Kyle Meyer and others take, "a critical look at sites featuring interesting typography."

Rich Rutter posits a tag-infused font matrix; as he puts it, "a website which automatically generates font stacks based on community input."

CSS Type Set is a hands-on typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their web content.

From i love typography, this quarter's list of fifteen typographically inspirational websites.

Jon Tan lays it all on the table: how to size type and images with ems, including calculations and references to related material. (Those marginal notes on Jon's site are great, btw.)

"The main point of all this is that there are potentially more fonts to consider than is generally accepted, so branch out a little (carefully and tastefully) and bring a little variety to sites out there."

"From a typographical perspective, the most appropriate method is to set box width in ems (elastic layout) as it ensures the measure is always set to the typographer’s specification."

"Seven basic methods on how you can create typographic contrast." Size, face, color, case, style, weight, and space.

Megan McDermott looks at the fonts available on Linux, Mac, and Windows and disputes the necessity of "playing it safe" with regard to core web fonts.

Mark Boulton offers, "a couple of simple guidelines to make your tables cleaner and more readable."

Rich Rutter: "With more than a nod to Owen Briggs’s pioneering work of 2002, I have created a base case with six iterations and 161 screenshots."

Quick bit of history and terminology.

Owen Briggs' 2002 classic, "method of text sizing in CSS that actually works consistently across our browsers without offending designers."

"As usual, I talked about type as being more than just choosing typefaces, which is where most designers, unfortunately, see typography begin and end."

"I understand [making technology fit around existing font licenses] being a practical approach (so designers wouldn’t have to get new licenses), but it does seem to shout out that the font vendors should be creating a new license or licenses that reflects what designer want to actually to with the fonts, ie. have them embeddable in web pages or not."

A little sIFR/W3C back-and-forth in this typophile discussion.

Thomas Phinney sums up the situation and digs into some details. Voice your opinion via his anonymous survey.

"Firefox’s way with text leaves much to be desired, as the following screen shots show."

Richard Rutter's and Mark Boulton's presentation as a PDF (with/without notes) from SxSW 2007.

Educated insight into some history and tech of screen typography.

"This CSS3 module defines properties for text manipulation and specifies their processing model. It covers line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation."

Good stuff. We're going to have to flickr some of these ourselves.

Jonathan Snook presents "sIFR fonts" - downloadable individual SWF files, each prepackaged with a typeface, for use with sIFR.

There's the potential here to serve different CSS typography (size, leading, measure ... proportions in general, not just typeface) based on available faces.