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by Chris_Newton 5062 days ago
While I agree with your basic argument, I think you’re overstating the case a little. As services like Google Web Fonts have become popular, several very good, free, and reasonably comprehensive font families have become available.

For example, the most popular sans on GWF is currently Open Sans, which does come in a wider range of weights and has italic and condensed versions available. Unlike this new font family from Adobe, Open Sans also renders well on Windows, including Windows XP and including all major browsers when used as a web font.
1 comments
ZeroGravitas 5062 days ago
I thought GWF were doing some processing to make the fonts work better on Windows? They way I understood it they were running the auto-hinter that Linux would use and then storing the hints inside the font for use by Windows. If that's true then the version hosted by Google (at least) should also look better than the complete disaster you get with entirely unhinted fonts at small sizes.
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Chris_Newton 5062 days ago
Interesting. I was looking at the Typekit page:

https://typekit.com/fonts/source-sans-pro

On the specimens there, Source Sans looks terrible at almost any sensible body text size in Firefox on Windows XP.

However, I was comparing those results with samples of Open Sans from Google Web Fonts, which look much better. Apologies if this wasn’t a fair comparison.

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