{"rowid": 184, "title": "Spruce It Up", "contents": "The landscape of web typography is changing quickly these days. We\u2019ve gone from the wild west days of sIFR to Cuf\u00f3n to finally seeing font embedding seeing wide spread adoption by browser developers (and soon web designers) with @font-face. For those who\u2019ve felt limited by the typographic possibilities before, this has been a good year.\n\nAs Mark Boulton has so eloquently elucidated, @font-face embedding doesn\u2019t come without its drawbacks. Font files can be quite large and FOUT\u2014that nasty flash of unstyled text\u2014can be a distraction for users.\n\nData URIs\n\nWe can battle FOUT by using Data URIs. A Data URI allows the font to be encoded right into the CSS file. When the font comes with the CSS, the flash of unstyled text is mitigated. No extra HTTP requests are required. \n\nDon\u2019t be a grinch, though. Sending hundreds of kilobytes down the pipe still isn\u2019t great. Sometimes, all we want to do is spruce up our site with a little typographic sugar. \n\nBe Selective\n\nDan Cederholm\u2019s SimpleBits is an attractive site. \n\n\n\nTake a look at the ampersand within the header of his site. It\u2019s the lovely (and free) Goudy Bookletter 1911 available from The League of Movable Type. The Opentype format is a respectable 28KB. Nothing too crazy but hold on here. Mr. Cederholm is only using the ampersand! Ouch. That\u2019s a lot of bandwidth just for one character.\n\nCan we optimize a font like we can an image? Yes. Image optimization essentially works by removing unnecessary image data such as colour data, hidden comments or using compression algorithms. How do you remove unnecessary information from a font? Subsetting. \n\nIf you\u2019re the adventurous type, grab a copy of FontForge, which is an open source font editing tool. You can open the font, view and edit any of the glyphs and then re-generate the font. The interface is a little clunky but you\u2019ll be able to select any character you don\u2019t want and then cut the glyphs. Re-generate your font and you\u2019ve now got a smaller file. \n\n\n\nThere are certainly more optimizations that can also be made such as removing hinting and kerning information. Keep in mind that removing this information may affect how well the type renders.\n\nAt this time of year, though, I\u2019m sure you\u2019re quite busy. Save yourself some time and head on over to the Font Squirrel Font Generator.\n\n\n\nThe Font Generator is extremely handy and allows for a number of optimizations and cross-platform options to be generated instantly. Select the font from your local system\u2014make sure that you are only using properly licensed fonts! \n\nIn this particular case, we only want the ampersand. Click on Subset Fonts which will open up a new menu. Unselect any preselected sets and enter the ampersand into the Single Characters text box. \n\nGenerate your font and what are you left with? 3KB. \n\n\n\nThe Font Generator even generates a base64 encoded data URI stylesheet to be imported easily into your project.\n\nCheck out the Demo page. (This demo won\u2019t work in Internet Explorer as we\u2019re only demonstrating the Data URI font embedding and not using the EOT file format that IE requires.) \n\nNo Unnecessary Additives\n\nIf you peeked under the hood of that demo, did you notice something interesting? There\u2019s no <span> around the ampersand. The great thing about this is that we can take advantage of the font stack\u2019s natural ability to switch to a fallback font when a character isn\u2019t available.\n\nJust like that, we\u2019ve managed to spruce up our page with a little typographic sugar without having to put on too much weight.", "year": "2009", "author": "Jonathan Snook", "author_slug": "jonathansnook", "published": "2009-12-19T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up/", "topic": "code"}