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by Silhouette
4731 days ago
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H&FJ make some of the best typefaces out there. So do Adobe, and Ascender, and other professional foundries, and several of their font families are available completely free. Despite all the praise for H&FJ's quality from some posters here, I've got Photoshop and a 400% zoom that says their screen fonts still have to fit on the same limited number of pixels as everyone else's, and inevitably, the pixels that get turned on are similar to other well-hinted fonts at small sizes. I've tried a few experiments, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest that H&FJ have some magic new technology that means their fonts are going to render better than everyone else's. Indeed, the quality of rendering in Firefox on Windows 7 appears to be somewhat variable: even some of the fonts on the linked page, such as the Whitney small caps used in headings, are far from crisp. The Archer small caps if you click through the "Learn More" link also seem to have obvious rendering/hinting problems at the top of many of the glyphs (and don't look anything like the "Firefox Windows" screenshot they show on their "Render Quality" page). |
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If there are free web fonts that have all those, they are hard to find. (I don't even know how to use old-style figures ordinarily, although I'm not an expert in these things. But they imply that they have some custom (probably hacky cause that's what it would take) solution to some special glyphs "Cloud-typography includes tools for implementing advanced typographic features, and delivering them even to browsers that aren't designed to support advanced typography"; )
But yeah, clearly the market is people who care about things like in that list. Some of which are _very_ rarely seen on the web right now; if this leads to them being seen on the web more, it may increase the number of people who know what a 'non-lining figure' is, and then increase the market of people who want such things. And hopefully increase the number of free fonts that have em too (although you can have all those features and still be a poorly-designed font), as well as lead to actual standard ways to do things like text figures on the web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures