Web typography and @font-face

With thanks to Mozilla and Jos Buivenga, I returned to a page first authored in 2008. The page attempted to use the CSS3 rule @font-face, but this was not functional. Fonts fascinated me even before computers and I doodled my own fonts as a youth. Back in the day when fonts were bit mapped I even built a couple crude decorative fonts that were wholly unreadable. When fonts went vector based and a full set required hundreds of glyphs, kerning pairs, and true italic and bold fonts, I walked away.

While I no longer have time to create fonts, I actually spend more time thinking about them than most. I followed carefully the development of the Vista ClearType "C" family fonts. Philip Shaw's CodeStyle site and his font stack builder remain an important tool as I design my own cascading style sheet font stacks.

When Jason Cranford Teague's new book, Fluid Web Typography, arrived in our library, I was the first to check the book out. The book is a superb primer on web typography, and does a nice job of summarizing the fontless moors of "web safe fonts" that all web page creators have been wandering since at least 1996.

Now the page with @font-face is functional, I will probably return to wandering the moors of web relatively safe font stacks. Sometimes wandering the moors is the path of least resistance.

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