Sorry, iPhone and Pad users

As of today, I’ve removed svg ver­sions of the type­faces my site uses (See Colophon). The ren­der­ing of svg faces in Webkit browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari has been less than sat­is­fac­to­ry, and in Chrome’s case svg fonts were used even when True­Type fonts (which Chrome ren­ders very well) were avail­able. This change means that this site will look bet­ter in new­er ver­sions of Chrome.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this removes the appear­ance of dynam­ic fonts from Chrome browsers pri­or to Chrome 2.0, from Opera users pri­or to Opera 10, and from all users of Mobile Safari, Apple’s brows­er for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. This last is actu­al­ly more of a bless­ing than a curse, as Mobile Safari has a crit­i­cal bug which crash­es the brows­er out­right if more than one weight of a font appears in the brows­er. That’s right, if even one word is bold­ed while oth­er text is not, watch out: your brows­er will crash. 

Even­tu­al­ly, I’d like to remove all web­fonts except for the woff for­mat any­how, but I’m wait­ing for brows­er sup­port to catch up. Prob­a­bly after Inter­net Explor­er 9 is released and adopt­ed by enough peo­ple I’ll drop the sup­port for the True­Type fonts. Hope­ful­ly by then, WebKit browsers will all sup­port woff faces as well. Google has announced that Chrome is get­ting on the band­wag­on, so with any luck Apple will catch up too.

Though it does­n’t change my typog­ra­phy choic­es at this point, I was very pleased to see Google releas­ing its own set of Web fonts. It would be nicer still if they made the fonts them­selves down­load­able so that web­sites could host them on their own serv­er and not be depen­dent on Google’s servers, though that’s prob­a­bly not too dif­fi­cult. The faces are released under the SIL Open Font License but it is unclear which options have been specified. 

I par­tic­u­lar­ly like their OFL Sorts Goudy TT and IM Fell with its dis­tressed vari­ants has a lot of appeal. I don’t have any plans yet to use these for any projects but it should­n’t be long before they start being used around the Web for any num­ber of kinds of sites.